SPARQL query and RDF data visualization

Project Information

Project page on drupal.org: SPARQL Views
Student: Lin Clark (linclark on d.o.)
Mentors:

• Laura Scott (Laura S)
• Stella Power (stella)
• Daniel Wehner (dereine) unofficial, but he's been helping me a lot

Current Status

I am updating my progress using Twitter. See the last few updates.

• July 10—I have released an alpha version of the module. I will be uploading an introduction video in the next few days.
• July 6—I have added Exhibit support, though to do any of the visualization I talked about in my proposal, I will have to build another faceting mechanism, since Exhibit rebuilds the objects on each state change.
• July 2—I am looking for an effective way to add faceted navigation for result sets. I though I would use exhibit when I first decided to do this project, but I am reconsidering.

  Exhibit would give SV two things
  1. Multiple display views, such as timeline and map—but these might be better achieved simply by using Views style plugins
  2. Faceted browsing—but this is a minor part of Exhibits functionality and may be faster on the client if implemented in a custom way for this module, using both PHP and JavaScript.

• June 30—Multiple value fields can now be consolidated. I still need to add this to the interface so users can decide whether to consolidate a field or not.
• June 26—I have been able to generalize the SPARQL query engine pretty well. I have demoed it for the Linked Data Meetup at SemTech. It is integrated with Token API and I also have hacked argument support in a way. It is still quite limited in its support for complex SPARQL queries.
• June 6—I am integrating the SPARQL backend with the RDFx module's SPARQL support to return a parsed array from the query. The one task left for generalizing it enough for release is handling how fields are added based on the applied filters.
• June 1—Using dereine's Twitter Views as a model, I have been able to create a plugin that queries a SPARQL endpoint. It is quite hacked, but I am currently figuring out how to generalize it.

References

• Project proposal

Goal and Deliverables

• Module for querying SPARQL endpoint and bringing the data into Drupal in a way that it can be themed
• Integration with different visualization techniques of that data. This is possibly its own module or integration with other modules. Related modules are Exhibit and Facet API.

Project Schedule

I have been making good headway on Views integration, so I have switched #2 and #3.

1. May 24 - 31st - explore Views API and general best practices, explore Yahoo! Pipes and MashQL functionality
2. June 1 - 21 - Code SPARQL query building interface, or integrate with existing interface
3. June 21 - July 12 - Code basic visualization features, test with raw SPARQL query and/or Views on internal database
4. July 12 - submit midterm
5. July 16 - August 2 - Feed data from SPARQL query builder into database and expose to Views
6. August 3 - August 16 - Test with example use cases, explore possibilities for further development
7. August 17 - August 20 - polish up and submit final report