From the category archives:

web 3.0

If we are about Web 3.0 - we are about SPARQL

by alex on October 3, 2008

Recently we’ve been talking about how it’s complicated to create and implement new standarts - which have no body, no techniques and no practical approach but only a set of rules. So the new HTML version 5 is no exception. But today we are going to talk about something more sophisticated and deep - SPARQL, which is drafted by the same crew - W3C.

Web 3.0 as we see it

I know, the term itself is very subjective - but if we use our imagination a bit - what Web 3.0 would be formed of? There are many visions - 3D applications in browser, operation system in browser and so on, but there’s one more - artificial intelligence. We have to make our machines think someday! What does any intelligent system need? Brains. The most perfect and suitable brain for intellegent network machine is RSS feeds - lots of them. So to unify somehow we have to have one query language for all of them.

One type of query for different types of data

So, SPARQL - imagine all the RSS feeds for blogs / news services/ social networks around the Net. They are all different - different structure, different formats - and now, with one SQL-like query you can fetch the information from all of them. Cool, ha? This is what SPARQL is about.

What makes SPARQL so simple and so intelligent?

Ontologies and prefix. Each SPARQL query is pre-defined with strict ontology or what pattern to use.

Query example from Wikpedia:

PREFIX abc: <http://example.com/exampleOntology#>
SELECT ?capital ?country
WHERE {
  ?x abc:cityname ?capital ;
     abc:isCapitalOf ?y .
  ?y abc:countryname ?country ;
     abc:isInContinent abc:Africa .
}

The query will return all capital cities in Africa.

Primarly there are no released implementations of SPARQL still, but few projects are in development.

This is about vision. Of course it’s still very subjection and the form of the concept called Web 3.0 is about to change completely. But the direction is impressive - we are very close to create A.I. as we’ve seen it in movies - the machine walks, the machine thinks, the machine feels.

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