How to get composer of a symphony in dbpedia? - sparql

Question

This is my query
select *
{
?symphonies_by_composer <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#broader> <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Symphonies_by_composer> .
?symphony <http://purl.org/dc/terms/subject> ?symphonies_by_composer .
}
I run it over Dbpedia end point http://dbpedia.org/sparql/
it gives me many symphonies. i want to construct my triples, adding my own property, which is mo:composedBy like this:
PREFIX mo: <http:blablabla.com/mo#>
construct
{
?symphony mo:composedBy ?composer .
?symphony a mo:Symphony
}
{
?symphonies_by_composer <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#broader> <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Symphonies_by_composer> .
?symphony <http://purl.org/dc/terms/subject> ?symphonies_by_composer .
}
but i don't know how to get the binding for the ?composer variable.
Do you know how ?
(I'm aware that there might be no way to get it, if you think there is no way, kindly just let me know and i will pass, unfortunately, those data)

Answer 1

There seems to be no explicit relation in DBPedia connecting these symphonies to an actual resource that represents the composer.
A possible workaround is to extract the name of the composer from the prefLabel of the category, by snipping off the first bit ("Symphonies by"):
PREFIX mo: <http://example.com/mo#>
PREFIX dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
CONSTRUCT
{
?symphony mo:composedBy ?composer_name .
?symphony a mo:Symphony
}
WHERE
{
?symphonies_by_composer skos:broader <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Symphonies_by_composer> ;
skos:prefLabel ?label .
?symphony dct:subject ?symphonies_by_composer .
BIND(SUBSTR(STR(?label), (STRLEN("Symphonies by ") + 1)) AS ?composer_name)
}
This will give you back the name of each composer as a literal value.
A second possible step is to try and reconstruct the actual IRI of the resource identifying the composer, from the name. For example, in the case of "Hans Werner Henze", the actual resource identifying the person is http://dbpedia.org/resource/Hans_Werner_Henze, so a simple further string operations or two, replacing spaces and concatenating with the dbpedia base IRI, will resolve this. However, this is brittle, as there is no guarantee that the resource exists, and even if it does, whether it actually identifies the composer (there might be more than one Hans Werner Henze, for instance).
Of course, you can expand this further by doing followup queries to verify that the resource exists and is the correct one, but it will require some additional trial and error. If the goal is simply the name of the composer, the first example query should work fine for most instances.