SPARQL Endpoint
A central point for structured data retrieval
One common way to retrieve and query Linked Data, which is structured as RDF graph, is SPARQL. Most applications serving Linked Data offer a so-called “SPARQL endpoint” as starting point for querying and retrieving results from underlying datasets as well as in general for automated data retrievals.
This application's SPARQL endpoint resides right at the URL of this very page. For reasons of convenience and usability, this page is shown by the application's web server (instead of querying the underlying dataset) in order to present a human-friendly and -usable interface. Therefore, below also a Query Editor is available to create and transmit SPARQL queries directly on this endpoint including an appropriate display of respective result sets including the possibility to download them as CSV files.
By the way, this Query Editor as well as its result parser – some really outstanding pieces of technology – is one of the reused third-party libraries by this application: the Yet Another Sparql GUI (YASGUI). More information on that is available on another page of this website.
Editor for direct Endpoint Queries
What is SPARQL?
The recursive acronym SPARQL (pronounced like “sparkle”) stands for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. It become prevalent for querying sets of RDF statements nowadays and, although, SPARQL resembles certain characteristics of querying languages used for relational databases (like SQL), it is designed to operate on data that is organised in a directed, labelled graph – more specifically, RDF’s data model – as sets of “subject-predicate-object” triples. So in fact, SPARQL has more in common with querying languages for “document-key-value” stores (like NoSQL) than with others.
Learn more about SPARQL on WikipediaHow can I use this endpoint?
In order to perform actual queries on this endpoint – for example with your own application, you need to pass your
(URL-encoded)
SPARQL request as an URL query parameter query in an HTTP GET or POST request to the URL of
this very page. For large queries, you can pass your (uncoded) SPARQL query via an HTTP POST request body, while declaring the
HTTP Content-Type header as application/sparql-query. You can control the output format by using the HTTP Accept header
field (e.g. text/ttl will result in a response in Turtle syntax).