Saturday, February 14, 2009

Polish Your SPARQL, Make It Shine

I attended my first meeting of the Washington Semantic Web MeetUp. It was the first time I had ever seen wine and cheese at a tech event. Whether this reflects the rarefied atmosphere of the semantic web or the quality of hospitality of Reiters, I don’t know. Either way, it was a delightful change from pizza and soft drinks, which are the usual fare for such occasions.

Daniel Mekonnen of Top Quandrant had already begun his presentation by the time I arrived. He said that it is helpful to think in terms of patterns in order to understand SPARQL. It is a query language related to SQL, as its name suggests. He suggested that programmers put their filters at the top of queries. He indicated that the use of optional would greatly reduce speed. He also suggested that it is better to implement SPARQL in TBC rather than Gruff.

No comments: