vSPARQL: A view definition language for the semantic web

Abstract

Translational medicine applications would like to leverage the biological and biomedical ontologies, vocabularies, and data sets available on the semantic web. We present a general solution for RDF information set reuse inspired by database views. Our view definition language, vSPARQL, allows applications to specify the exact content that they are interested in and how that content should be restructured or modified. Applications can access relevant content by querying against these view definitions. We evaluate the expressivity of our approach by defining views for practical use cases and comparing our view definition language to existing query languages.

Ontological labels for automated location of anatomical shape differences

“…First, the subclass hierarchy of the term Region_of_myocardium was extracted from the full ontology. This extraction was performed using the Jena 1 implementation of vSPARQL [18, 19, 20], an extension to the ontology query langauge SPARQL that allows for recursive and sub-queries. In addition to this extraction, a complete set of terms pertaining to the cardiovascular system in the FMA and other biomedical ontologies has been identified for future extraction.…”

SWOWS and dynamic queries to build browsing applications on linked data

“…RVL [23] is an early effort, using an imperative language for defining views based on an independently defined query language (RQL [20]). vSPARQL [31] extends the SPARQL 1.0 grammar by allowing named views defined with CONSTRUCT queries. Schenk and Staab, working on Networked Graphs [30], propose an RDF-based syntax to define views, also based on SPARQL 1.0 CONSTRUCT queries.…”

A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

“…The vSPARQL query engine enables access to data in RDF and OWL by processing both standard SPARQL queries as well as queries written in our extended vSPARQL syntax [40]. vSPARQL extends SPARQL with both nested and recursive queries.…”

“…Our intermediate language, IML [46], is intended to be equivalent to vSPARQL in expressivity, but more intuitive for query composition. The basic expressions in IML were chosen to closely align with the sorts of operations that an ontology author/editor uses when manually extracting (and possibly modifying and/or extending) an ontology subset.…”

“…Instead, it rewrites IML queries into equivalent vSPARQL queries and sends them to the vSPARQL service for evaluation. IML also lends itself more readily than vSPARQL to query optimization as we have demonstrated in [46], but have not yet incorporated in the IML service. It is well suited for use in a graphical query construction interface, as for example our VIQUEN application [37].…”