Abstract

SPARQL query composition is difficult for the lay-person or even the experienced bioinformatician in cases where the data model is unfamiliar. Established best-practices and internationalization concerns dictate that semantic web ontologies should use terms with opaque identifiers, further complicating the task. We present SPARQL Assist: a web application that addresses these issues by providing context-sensitive type-ahead completion to existing web forms. Ontological terms are suggested using their labels and descriptions, leveraging existing XML support for internationalization and language-neutrality.

Highlights

  • The health care and life science sectors have been some of the most enthusiastic adopters of semantic web technologies

  • It is crucial that we do not allow convenience to direct the development of a core global resource - the Semantic Web - and the problem should be solved at the level of the tools provided, rather than the resources themselves

  • We present SPARQL Assist: a web application that facilitates the construction of SPARQL queries by providing context-sensitive type-ahead completion

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Summary

Introduction

The health care and life science sectors have been some of the most enthusiastic adopters of semantic web technologies. The benefits of the RDF/OWL data model are well-understood by bioinformaticians who have too long had to deal with the problem of integrating data from multiple sources with wildly different underlying schema These benefits are less obvious, to clinicians and researchers who merely see one mysterious query language (SQL) exchanged for another (SPARQL). RDF/XML provides built-in language neutrality by way of the xml:lang attribute; an ontology can be internationalized by providing multiple rdfs:label or rdfs:comment properties with appropriate xml:lang attributes. Even those projects who have, in principle, adopted language neutrality for their classes (e.g. OBO), have not done so for their properties (OBO Relationship Ontology [4]). It is crucial that we do not allow convenience to direct the development of a core global resource - the Semantic Web - and the problem should be solved at the level of the tools provided, rather than the resources themselves

SPARQL Assist
Conclusion

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