Publication
On the Fly SPARQL Execution for Structured Non-RDF Web APIs
Torsten Spieldenner
In: Massimo Marchiori; Francisco Domínguez Mayo; Joaquim Filipe (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies. International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2020), November 3-5, ISBN 978-989-758-478-7, SCITEPRESS, 2020.
Abstract
The concept of the Semantic Web, built around the idea of semantically described Linked Data and the data
model of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), has become a prominent idea of seamless access to,
and integration of, data. The number of tools to translate from non-RDF to RDF-representation of data has
since then been ever increasing. However, to this day, numerous Web APIs do offer time critical data only
in non-RDF-formats. Examples for this are traffic and public transport live data. Due to its nature, an offline
data dump, as mostly generated by RDF lifting translation tools, is not practical, as it becomes inconsistent
with the original data quickly. In this paper, we for this present an approach, that, published as a microservice,
allows to send semantic queries against the legacy Web interfaces directly, and return the result in
RDF. The service API follows the SPARQL 1.1 Query API specification, and also supports federated queries
over distributed endpoints, allowing an easy and accessible way for semantically enriched data integration
over legacy endpoints.