Hi,
I am doing some 'kicking the tyres' tests on Wikidata as Linked Data. I like the SPARQL end-point, which is more helpful than most, and successfully managed a query for "people with the surname Light" last night. (Only five of them in the world, apparently, but that's another matter. :-) )
What I do have an issue with is the content negotiation. I kept failing to get an RDF rendition of my results, and as a last resort I read the documentation [1].
This described a postfix pattern which delivers RDF XML (e.g. [2]). However, this pattern is itself subject to content negotiation, and an initial 303 response converts the URL to e.g. [3]. I am interested in knowing what pattern of URL will deliver RDF/XML /without /requiring content negotiation, and the answer to that question is not [2] but [3]. This matters, for example, in scenarios where one wants to use XSLT's document() function to retrieve an RDF XML response directly. The URL pattern [2] will fail. So the documentation is currently unhelpful.
In a similar vein, is there a syntax for running a SPARQL query on Wikidata such that the response is delivered as RDF XML? In many end-points there is a parameter you can add to specify the response format, which allows you to submit searches as HTTP requests and include the results directly in your (in my case XML-based) processing chain. An HTML results page isn't very machine-processible!
Thanks,
Richard
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access [2] https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3807415.rdf [3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q3807415.rdf