Textmate bundle for Turtle and Sparql


I recently ran into the Textmate bundle for Turtle, an extension for the Textmate osx editor aimed at facilitating working with RDF and SPARQL. If you happen to be using these technologies, well I'd suggest you take a look at the following post.

The Resource Description Framework is a general-purpose language for representing information which is widely used on the web in order to encode metadata in a machine-interoperable format.

Turtle, the terse RDF Triple Language, is a textual syntax for RDF which aims at human readability and compactness (among other things). This is what it looks like:

@prefix rdf: 
@prefix rdfs: 
@prefix xsd: .
@base 

:MotorVehicle a rdfs:Class.

:PassengerVehicle a rdfs:Class;
   rdfs:subClassOf :MotorVehicle.

:Person a rdfs:Class.

xsd:integer a rdfs:Datatype.

:registeredTo a rdf:Property;
   rdfs:domain :MotorVehicle;
   rdfs:range  :Person.

:myLittleCar a PassengerVehicle

The termite library in question, in a nutshell, provides a bunch of snippets and query mechanisms that make it easier to work with Turtle RDF and related technologies. More precisely, here's the official features breakdown:

  • Language grammar for Turtle and SPARQL 1.1
  • Powerful (!) auto-completion (live-aggregated)
  • Documentation for classes and roles/properties at your fingertips (live-aggregated)
  • Interactive SPARQL query scratchpad
  • Some snippets (prefixes and document skeleton)
  • Solid syntax validation
  • Commands for instant graph visualization of a knowledge base (requires Graphviz and Raptor)
  • Conversion between all common RDF formats

Example

In order to query a SPARQL endpoint (eg DBPedia) just type this in and run it (apple-R):

#QUERY <http://dbpedia.org/sparql>                    
SELECT DISTINCT ?s ?label                             
WHERE {                                               
    ?s <http://dbpedia.org/property/season> ?o .      
}  

Obviously you can query any endpoint, e.g. data.nature.com:

#QUERY <http://data.nature.com/sparql>

PREFIX bibo:<http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/>
PREFIX dc:<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX dcterms:<http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX foaf:<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX npg:<http://ns.nature.com/terms/>
PREFIX npgg:<http://ns.nature.com/graphs/>
PREFIX npgx:<http://ns.nature.com/extensions/>
PREFIX owl:<http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>
PREFIX prism:<http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/basic/2.1/>
PREFIX rdf:<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs:<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX sc:<http://purl.org/science/owl/sciencecommons/>
PREFIX skos:<http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
PREFIX void:<http://rdfs.org/ns/void#>
PREFIX xsd:<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>


SELECT *                            
WHERE {                                                
    ?doi a npg:Article . 
    ?doi dc:title ?title .
    ?doi prism:publicationDate ?date
} 
limit 100 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Autocompletion, visualisations etc… it may be the Textmate-Semantic Web swiss army knife you've been looking for.

Cite this blog post:


Michele Pasin. Textmate bundle for Turtle and Sparql. Blog post on www.michelepasin.org. Published on Aug. 13, 2013.

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