How to explore SPARQL endpoint?

In this article you will learn: - how to explore SPARQL endpoint with Ontorion™ SPARQL Tools for Excel - about SPARQL autocomplete tool from Cognitum

Ontorion™ SPARQL Tools for Excel latest release offers two new features enriching the SPARQL experience. First one is Explore SPARQL endpoint tool, which enables to get a quick overview of the data content of the endpoint. Second is SPARQL autocomplete tool, which guides user throughout writing the query with intelligent autocomplete hints.

Motivation

A growing amount of data is made public via SPARQL endpoints. You can explore the data by asking SPARQL queries. One of the most famous SPARQL endpoints is DBpedia - a semantic version of Wikipedia. Many public institutions expose some of their data in such an open way as well. A good example is The Environment Agency of England and Wales, which publishes data about bathing water quality .
The basic building block of SPARQL data set is a triple. It is a statement of the form subject-predicate-object. Apart from that, the structure of the data can be quite loosely defined. Thus it may sometimes be difficult to explore a new SPARQL endpoint for the first time.

Ontorion SPARQL Tools for Excel

We have just released a SPARQL addin for Excel. This Addin has been developed by Cognitum as part of its semantic technology framework: Ontorion Server and Fluent Editor. Ontorion SPARQL Tools for Excel is a free Addin to MS Excel 2010 and 2013 and can be downloaded here. This addin has been designed to help people in the Knowledge Management business or people interested in the data available from SPARQL endpoints to easily import data from a SPARQL endpoint and/or an Ontorion Server. With the number of SPARQL endpoint growing year after year, this seems as a very important feature that was lacking in Excel until the present day. As you will see with our adding it is possible to do all of this with few single clicks.