Hi all,
sorry for the late answer. First of all, thanks for the encouraging
comments! In order to track suggestions and bugs more easily I've
created a Github repo here:
https://github.com/nvitucci/wikisparql-project
I'll try and write up stuff as things progress, but feel free to start
using the issue tracker.
@Paul:
You can generally run those O.K. on the DBpedia SPARQL
endpoint.
It would be nice to see a few more horsepower put behind this.
You're definitely right. Speaking of "pure horsepower" the machine
hosting WikiSPARQL is not that big right now (32 GB of RAM, 8-thread
CPU, no SSDs), but there are a couple things I'd like to do from the
backend side in order to try and improve this kind of queries.
@Markus:
By the way, if you can control the output UI
completely, you may consider
adding this: instead of a property or item URI, always display its label
(in a selected language), and merely show the URI as a tooltip or similar.
This could be done after querying with Javascript so that people don't need
to do many join+filter parts in queries just to retrieve the labels.
Showing a (localized) label in place of a URI is a neat idea, I planned
to do that but my main concern is for when you get a lot of URIs as a
result of your query, because this might add some overhead - to be tried
though.
P.S. Your interface is very nice, but as Paul remarked
it seems that some
of the queries are a little slow. Could you maybe rewire the SPARQL
execution
faster.
Of course, I understand if you want to use it for your
own testing, but if
your main interest is in the UI and not the backend, this might be a
nice
cooperation.
I decided to spend some time on the UI because it makes the use of the
endpoint easier, but my main goal is to try and understand together with
the community what can be done to make the use of an endpoint as
efficient as possible, not only by tuning the right parameters (e.g.
should there be a timeout on the queries? how much RAM should I make
available? etc.) but even by looking at different technologies. It's
great though to have a chance to compare results with other endpoints,
and it might be a good idea to give a chance to decide which endpoint(s)
to use as you suggested, thus I can see many chances for cooperation. By
the way, can I reuse your queries as example queries?
@Kingsley:
SPARQL URLs should work across SPARQL endpoints.
Basically, you should
only change the host part of the URL to execute the same query across
different endpoints.
Indeed, that would be pretty easy, provided that SPARQL "variants" (e.g.
the use of parentheses around aggregate expressions, or magic
properties) are handled correctly.
Cheers,
Nicola
