What can SPARQL do for you?

Dr. Scott Henninger from TopBraid will introduce SPARQL as a Swiss army knife of Semantic Applications.

Not just a query language, SPARQL 1.1 is a cornerstone technology for working with heterogeneous data. As SQL is to the relational world, SPARQL to the RDF world is more than just a query language. It is a general data management language with programmatic constructs that range from logical constructs to string manipulation.

When SPARQL is combined with the flexibility of RDF graphs, RDFS and higher-order languages such as OWL, the result enables powerful standards-based architectures. Additionally, applications benefit such architectures with seamless inclusion of linked data and a method of common access to heterogeneous data repositories.

In addition to introducing SPARQL and RDF concepts, the presentation will provide a number of examples of how SPARQL-based technologies can be used in other ways. For example, it can be used for general-purpose inferences (much larger solution space than OWL reasoning), to create ETL data transformation pipelines, and to provide the engine for driving Web-based HTML 5 applications.

Bio: Dr. Scott Henninger is the Vice President of Technology Adoption and TopBraid EVN (Enterprise Vocabulary Management) Product Manager at TopQuadrant, Inc., where he is responsible for helping enterprises architect, develop and deploy Semantic Web applications using TopBraid Suite. Leveraging his specialities in information retrieval and technology development and bringing over twenty years of experience in technology education, Scott has contributed to the design and delivery of TopQuadrant’s highly successful training series. Before joining TopQuadrant, Scott was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he spent 15 years researching and teaching advanced Web-based technologies, software engineering and human-computer interaction. He holds a PhD in Computer Science specializing in Information Retrieval, Software Engineering and Cognitive Science from the University of Colorado-Boulder.