Querying DBpedia for English-only description (with SPARQL)

Question

I'm querying dbpedia.org for a description of Big Ben with this SPARQL query:

select ?desc 
where {
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Big_Ben> <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#comment> ?desc
}

This returns a list of descriptions in at least 10 different languages. How do I specify that I only want the English language description?

Related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6747019/how-get-dbpedia-data-in-a-specific-language — Ben Companjen, Jan 13 '13 at 20:31

score 21 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 13 '11 at 03:56

The keys you need to know are that str() and lang() pull apart the text and language of the value, so you can do this:

select str(?desc) 
where {
  <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Big_Ben> <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#comment> ?desc
  FILTER (langMatches(lang(?desc),"en"))
}

Querying DBpedia for English-only description (with SPARQL)

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