GitHub - tialaramex/sparql-query: command line SPARQL query tool (original) (raw)

sparql-query is a command-line tool for accessing SPARQL endpoints over HTTP

Dependencies:

You will need at least glib, libcurl, GNU readline, and libxml2, on a Unix-like system.

It has been intentionally designed to 'feel' similar to tools for interrogating SQL databases. For example, you can enter a query over several lines, using a semi-colon at the end of a line to indicate the end of your query. It also supports readline so that you can more easily recall and edit previous queries, even across sessions. It can be used non-interactively, for example from a shell script. It doesn't have difficult or hard to find dependencies so it should build fairly easily on typical Unix-like systems.

You can find a list of some existing public SPARQL endpoints on the ESW wiki http://esw.w3.org/topic/SparqlEndpoints

For example, to access the DBpedia endpoint, which contains knowledge gleaned from Wikipedia, you would type:

sparql-query http://dbpedia.org/sparql

sparql-query can be run non-interactively by specifying your entire SPARQL query as the last parameter to the command. In this case you should terminate the query with a semi-colon. The query will be executed and the results streamed to standard out. You may need to be careful with any quoting rules in your shell if using sparql-query this way directly from the command line or a script, due to SPARQL making a lot of use of symbols that are meaningful to the shell.

You can specify a MIME type to be used in the Accept: line for the HTTP query in a SPARQL query, as a hint to the endpoint about your preferred format. In non-interactive mode the default is the SPARQL results format, application/sparql-results+xml when interactive the default is text/plain and the sparql-query program will translate SPARQL results format into a more humane format for display.

ToDo

Add some way to do PUT uploading of RDF to compliant stores, maybe?

sparql-query was developed by Nick Lamb and Steve Harris at Garlik. You are welcome to modify, copy and redistribute this software under the terms of the GNU GPL which is included in the file COPYING.