From time immemorial, people have asked questions. In ancient Greece, questions and answers defined the educational technique known as the Socratic method. Visitors would also query the Oracle at Delphi to find answers to their most personal questions. Nowadays, we use search engines.

In the world of semantic web data, SPARQL is the language we use to ask questions and get answers in RDF, similar to the way in which SQL queries a database. If you are a developer and want to work with RDF data, it's important to learn how to use this standard query language. In this meeting, we get down into the details, with a short hands-on workshop.

This meeting is for the programmer, knowledge engineer, database administrator or system architect. Bring your laptop! We'll start with a short tutorial on SPARQL, and then work through some examples using real data on the web. The DBPedia site has extracted thousands of triples from data contained in Wikipedia pages. We will use this site, along with our own data, to create a data mashup and practice using some basic SPARQL queries. We will experiment with a live triple store and query engine.

Our instructor for this session will be Daniel Mekonnen of TopQuadrant. He will be using Gruff (by Franz) as the client. You will need to install Allegrograph and Gruff, available from http://agraph.franz.c...