A few years ago I wrote Twinkle, a simple GUI interface for working with SPARQL. While its not the most polished of user interfaces and its in sore need of an update, it’s still serviceable and has been successfully used as a development tool by teams of engineers I’ve worked with in the past.

I gave a short talk on Twinkle at an Oxford SWIG meeting, so you can flick through the slides if you want a quick overview of the functionality. I also moved the code to a google code project to start the process of updating it

Twinkle has the capability to work with a range of different data sources and includes a full SPARQL client, so you can use it to work with any SPARQL endpoint that is accessible from your desktop. Out of the box Twinkle is already configured to work with the Govtrack and DbPedia endpoints, but you can easily add more by changing the configuration.

If you download and unzip the distribution into a directory you should end up with an etc/config.n3 file. This file contains all of the configuration that drives the user interface, including a section that configures remote SPARQL endpoints, e.g:

<http://dbpedia.org/sparql> a sources:Endpoint
    ; sources:defaultGraph "http://dbpedia.org"
    ; rdfs:label "DBpedia.org".

<http://www.rdfabout.com/sparql> a sources:Endpoint
    ; rdfs:label "GovTrack.us".

The above snippet configures two remote endpoints, and applies labels to them so that they appear in the Twinkle UI, under the “Remote Services” section on the left-hand menu. Because some endpoints, such as DbPedia, require to specify a default graph in the SPARQL protocol request, you can also specifiy that in the configuration if necessary.

If you have a Platform Store, or just want to access some data held in the Platform, then you can use Twinkle to perform your SPARQL queries. For example I have a store containing NASA space flight data. The SPARQL endpoint for this store is at:

http://api.talis.com/stores/space/services/sparql

So to register this in Twinkle, I can edit the configuration file and include the following snippet:

<http://api.talis.com/stores/services/sparql> a sources:Endpoint
    ; rdfs:label "NASA Space Data".

Once you’ve restarted the UI you should now be able to click on the Remote “NASA Space Data” service and open up a window into which you can start executing SPARQL queries.

If you’re new to SPARQL, or are interested in playing with the above space data, then you can look over the following slides from a recent SPARQL training session that I ran:

By rob

The slides contain a number of sample queries that should help get you started. Unfortunately some of the diagrams don’t look great in slideshare, but you should be able to download them for a closer look.