Samuel's Tech Blog

Egon pointed to an interesting blog post about a feature that is available as a an extension to Jena, the semantic web framework available in Bioclipse. It allows to very easily query multiple SPARQL endpoints from a single SPARQL query (using the SERVICE keyword), and use variable bound from one endpoint when querying the next.

This is very useful in general. I was also thinking of the specific scenario (along the lines we have partly already been thinking) to use multiple Semantic MediaWikis as community maintained databanks, for querying back into Bioclipse. Being able to use multiple MediaWiki installs is very useful because it is hard to incorporate a very efficient access restriction system in MediaWiki (due to the nature of how it works, with template calls and all), so then it is better to be able to have separate wikis for content which needs special restrictions.

UPDATE 29/3: See new results here

I was a bit worried over the performance of the RDF facilities in Bioclipse, as a SPARQL query for doing NMR Spectrum similarity search, including a numerical comparison run in Pellet (against datasets which are attached), were quite unsatisfactory, being some 2 orders of magnitude worse than some Prolog code I wrote for doing the same task (But of course, pure SPARQL with filtering is probably not what pellet is optimized for ...).

The problem I've had, to find a working SPARQL query for doing similarity search for spectra, according to a list of peak shift values (documented on this blog: post1, post 2 and on semanticoverflow) is now finally solved, thanks to helpful advice from Brandon Ibach on the [pellet-users] mailing list.

This is a great SPARQL FAQ, and seemingly a good starting point for finding out anything SPARQL.

EDIT (19/2): The problem with doing this with a SPARQL query, is now solved! See this blog post.

Thought I should write up on my NMRSpectrum similarity search problem, which I've got quite stuck with ... even after trying to get some advice from Semantic Overflow. So ... here we go.

I have a problem that I can't seem to express successfully in either pure SPARQL nor using OWL class descriptions, seemingly because the problem combines lists, property chains, and numerical value constraints, in a troublesome mix.

On something I realized a minute ago ...

Though being really different types of technologies, it might at first be tempting to compare a SPARQL query with a Prolog rule returning a list of results (Or at least it was to me until just a minute ago). In fact, SPARQL queries and prolog rules that return their results as lists, DO share some similarities. For example, in both you provide patterns of RDF statements with variables that are to be bound to each other or to RDF entities, in order to find all queried entities that match the pattern.

But then comes some important differences, in how SPARQL handles cases where one wants to evaluate looked-up entities with a function, like an arithmetic one. In SPARQL this has to be done (I think) with the FILTER construct, but that also means that backtracking is not done if nothing passes the filter (and that is the true meaning of a filter anyway, isn't it).