Convert user query to SPARQL Query - sparql

I'm building a movie ontology for my class project. My problem is how do I integrate user entered query (Through provided web page) to SPARQL Query and get the list of answers from the database through the ontology.
I have some knowledge of mapping the ontology with my database. Please provide me a solution for this.
Thanks in advance.
(I'm using Protege with ontopro plugin for mapping)
Thanks

If you mean converting user queries to machine understandable queries, is not an easy task. This is a question in the domain of Question Answering (QA) and needs sophisticated work.
Three steps of building a QA system including question analysis, document (database) analysis and answer extraction. Each of these three, also consists of different tasks. For example, question analysis includes feature selection and extraction, building a classifier and evaluating it to get the Expected Answer Type (EAT).
But if you have a static format for your queries, then you can ask users to propose their queries in that format and then, you have an easier job of matching user queries to SPARQL queries and getting the answers.
Personally, I think you should start from the point of having the SPARQL query or use a keyword-based interface instead of a text-based interface if you want to make your job easy as this method is suitable for small projects.

What do you mean by user query? a text search? a faceted search? a mix? something else? For me, this is not clear and a bit of detail would help understanding.
Also an example would actually be ideal. Like the "user query" and the "sparql equivalent" if possible.

Related

Mount a SPARQL endpoint for use with custom ontologies and triple RDFs

I've been trying to figure out how to mount a SPARQL endpoint for a couple of days, but as much as I read I can not understand it.
Comment my intention: I have an open data server mounted on CKAN and my goal is to be able to use SPARQL queries on the data. I know I could not do it directly on the datasets themselves, and I would have to define my own OWL and convert the data I want to use from CSV format (which is the format they are currently in) to RDF triple format (to be used as linked data).
The idea was to first test with the metadata of the repositories that can be generated automatically with the extension ckanext-dcat, but is that I really do not find where to start. I've searched for information on how to install a Virtuoso server for the SPARQL, but the information I've found leaves a lot to be desired, not to say that I can find nowhere to explain how I could actually introduce my own OWLs and RDFs into Virtuoso itself.
Someone who can lend me a hand to know how to start? Thank you
I'm a little confused. Maybe this is two or more questions?
1. How to convert tabular data, like CSV, into the RDF semantic format?
This can be done with an R2RML approach. Karma is a great GUI for that purpose. Like you say, a conversion like that can really be improved with an underlying OWL ontology. But it can be done without creating a custom ontology, too.
I have elaborated on this in the answer to another question.
2. Now that I have some RDF formatted data, how can I expose it with a SPARQL endpoint?
Virtuoso is a reasonable choice. There are multiple ways to deploy it and multiple ways to load the data, and therefore LOTs of tutorial on the subject. Here's one good one, from DBpedia.
If you'd like a simpler path to starting an RDF triplestore with a SPARQL endpoint, Stardog and Blazegraph are available as JARs, and RDF4J can easily be deployed within a container like Tomcat.
All provide web-based graphical interfaces for loading data and running queries, in addition to SPARQL REST endpoints. At least Stardog also provides command-line tools for bulk loading.

How to design a database for efficient search-ability?

I am trying to design a database with search-ability at its core. My knowledge of database design and SQL is all self-taught and still fairly beginner-level, so my questions may possibly have easy answers.
Suppose I have a single table containing a large number of records. For example, suppose that each record contains details of a different computer application (name, developer, version number, etc). A list of keywords are associated with each record, such as a list of programming languages used to write the applications.
I wish to be able to enter one or more keywords (each separated by a space) into a search box, and I wish to have all associated records returned. How should I design the database to store the keywords, and what SQL query would I need to apply to the search text? (The search should be uppercase/lowercase independent.)
My next challenge would then be to order search results by relevance, and to allow entire key-phrases as well as keywords to be associated with each record. For example, if I type "Visual Basic" into the search field, I want the first results to have exactly the key-phrase "Visual Basic" associated with them. The next results should all have both keywords "Visual" and "Basic" associated with them, and the remaining results should have only one of these keywords. Again, please could anyone advise on how to implement this?
The final challenge I believe would be much harder: how much 'intelligent interpretation' can I design my database and SQL code to handle? For example, if I search for "CSS", can I get the records with the key-phrase "Cascading Style Sheets" to appear? Can I also get SQL to identify and search for similar words, such as plurals of search phrases or, for example, "programmer" or "programming" when "program" is input? Thanks!
Learn relational algebra, normalization rules, and SQL.
Start with entity relationships. Sounds like you could have an APPLICATION table as parent for a FEATURE child table, with a one-to-many relationship between the two. You'll query them by JOINing one to the other:
SELECT A.NAME, F.NAME
FROM APPLICATION AS A
JOIN FEATURE AS F
ON F.APP_ID = A.ID
Your challenges would not suggest SQL and relations to me. I would think more in terms of a parser, an indexer and search engine like Lucene, and a NoSQL document database like MongoDB.
I've come to the conclusion, after a LOT of research, that #duffymo's answer is hinting in the right direction. For the benefit of other n00bs like me, here's the conclusion I've drawn:
Many open source search engine server apps are out there to install for free. Lucene was the first I had ever heard of them, but others do exist and I think my favourite at the moment is Sphinx. As far as I can tell, the 'indexer' that #duffymo mentions is built into it. I have learnt that the indexer is the program that will examine my database for keywords and will automatically keep a record of which results should be returned for different input queries. I have also now learnt that the terminology for the behaviour I was looking for (and which Sphinx has) is 'stemming'. I'm still not sure what role a parser plays in all this...
A more basic approach would be to use SQL itself. Whilst I was already aware of the most basic of these (ie. using the LIKE keyword with 'wildcards'), I also discovered something a little more powerful: natural language / full-text search. For anyone not interested in installing a server app, I recommend you look this up.
Also, I see no reason why I would need to use NoSQL instead of SQL (as #duffymo has suggested), and so I'm going to stick with SQL for the moment (at least until I come across some good entry-level books to learn NoSQL from). Furthermore, I have very little intention to learn relational algebra until I know why I should and how it would be useful. The message here is that other beginners shouldn't be off-put by these things, as I don't think Sphinx requires any knowledge of them.
while I like #duffymo's answer, I will also suggest you research SPARQL and the wordnet project for your semantic equivalence questions.
If you choose Oracle, you can use the spatial option triple store to implement the SPARQL endpoint and do some very nice seaching like your css = Cascading Style Sheet example.

Using Lucene QueryAPI to access SQL

Can you advise on whether I can use just the Query functionality from Lucene to generate SQL queries? Something like an SQLQueryBuilder?
I have a massive SQL database of logs from a webserver cluster containing the original request and response strings plus some other useful/less bits and bobs. What I need to do is analyse the parameters in the original request and compare with the generated responses, looking at ratios, volatility, variability, consistency etc.
This question does not relate to the analysis stage, but only the retrieval of data from database which matches the parameters I'm interested in. So, I could just do this in good old sql queries, manually building the exact queries I need on a case-by-case basis. But that's kinda lame; I reckon we can be a bit smarter than that. Particularly as I can already see large numbers of similar but subtly different queries being useful. And as I'm hoping that I can expose a single search box via a web interface to non-technical end-users, adding sql queries seems like a bad idea... and a recipe for permanent maintenance requests (and can I be the first to say, er no thanks!).
In an ideal world I expose a search form, with the option to write simple queries like
request:"someAttribute=\"someValue\"" AND response="some hoped for result" AND daterange:30
which would then hopefully find all instances of requests which contain someAttribute="someValue" over the last 30 days. The results will then be put through standard statistical analyses on the given response text and printed out on-screen. At least, that's the idea.
Much of the actual logic to determine how to handle custom field definitions or special words I'll need to write myself, and that's ok. And NB, my non-technical end users are familiar enough with xml that they can handle a bit of attr="value" syntax, at least for the first iteration of the tool :D
In summary, I want to:
1) allow users to use google-like search syntax (e.g. via Lucene's QueryAPI) to specify text to match in the logs
2) allow a layer to manipulate the query based on special words or fields (e.g. this layer could be during a Java object phase)
3) convert the final query into an sql query appropriate for my database schema
4) query the database and spit back the resultset for statistical analysis
5) pretty-print on website:)
Am I completely barking up the wrong tree? It looks like it should be possible, but I can't seem to find much on it. I've been googling for a bit on this, for example trying "Lucene SQLQueryBuilder" as a possible start but didn't really find much by way of a lead.
So, my questions are:
Has anyone tried using Lucene's QueryAPI like this before? Did it work? Any gotchas?
Are there better query api libraries out there?
Examples, finished discussions and open-source implementations would be most helpful.
Many thanks.
NB: I don't think I want Lucene's search capabilities as such, as I'm only ever looking for exact matches. I just need a query layer on top of the database.
Lucene and SQL have very little in common as they're using totally different syntax (as HefferWolf mentioned) and different underlying data models. As you said yourself, I'm afraid you're barking the wrong tree.
There are however attempts, such as Hibernate Search to bridge this gap. These are interesting experiments as such, but I would be very careful to use any of that code in production.
You could possibly use Full Text Search features available in some SQL databases, or reindex all data in Lucene and use it without database.
I doubt you can reuse any code from lucene for this. Lucene does an internal rewrite of such queries but into a syntax which wouldn't be of much help for SQL I think.
name: Phil AND lastname: Miller AND NOT age: 26
would be rewritten to
+name Phil +lastname: Miller -age: 26
So I think you would have to write your on transition into a SQL Query syntax.
But maybe you can use Lucene as such for this. Have a look into hibernate-search which is quite handy to easily create a lucene index of a sql table.

Complex search across grails domain classes

I want to be able to do complex searches on grails objects. This is presently implemented using stored procedures on my site that build up a SQL query and parses all of those results.
Will something like the searchable plugin allow me to simplify this task? My guess is not, since it mostly is doing text based searching. The stored procedures are quite complex, and hard to change. Our users are employees, and the queries have to do with amounts of job experience and who they were working for, what skills they have, etc. The Employee domain object would have things like a list of roles that contain skills. The role would have a start and end date, etc.
A list of example queries:
All users with 5 years of experience in C++
All users who have worked for Stackoverflow, in California
All users who have at least 5 years of C++ experience, at least 2 years of Java experience, have worked for StackOverflow, and are available to work now.
I've never tried the searchable plugin so may be selling it short. Your best bet is probably HQL queries or Hibernate criteria builder. I like HQL for complex queries since it's similar to SQL. For a blog post comparing the use of these technologies from Grails see
http://blog.xebia.com/2008/06/04/querying-associations-in-grails-with-hql-criteria-and-hibernatecriteriabuilder/
For the HQL reference see
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.3/reference/en/html/queryhql.html
For Hibernate criteria see
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.3/reference/en/html/querycriteria.html
You could also have a look at the FilterPane plugin to help you (or the user) to build these queries. There is a GUI that can handle most of such questions, or you could resort to add the FilterPane fields yourself in the HTML and controller if you prefer to have the control over the queries.
FilterPane then translates the fields to Hibernate criteria builder internally.
All of the queries you have listed can be accomplished with the searchable plugin.
I believe you CAN do the queries you have suggested with HQL but Compass/Lucene is really the better tool for that solution
In my experience HQL queries were the only solution for complex queries.
Some queries even made it necessary to use non-Hibernate functions of the underlying DB, e.g. setting dialect = "org.hibernate.dialect.ExtendedMySqlDialect" in DataSource.groovy and then implementing something like this:
package org.hibernate.dialect;
import org.hibernate.Hibernate;
import org.hibernate.dialect.function.*;
public class ExtendedMySqlDialect extends MySQL5InnoDBDialect {
public ExtendedMySqlDialect() {
registerFunction("timeStampAdd", new SQLFunctionTemplate(Hibernate.TIMESTAMP, "TIMESTAMPADD(?1, ?2, ?3)"));
registerFunction("timeStampDiff", new SQLFunctionTemplate(Hibernate.INTEGER, "TIMESTAMPDIFF(?1, ?2, ?3)"));
}
The above functions might also help you when dealing with dates.

Wiki Database, is there one?

I was searching the net for something like a wiki database, just like wikipedia but instead stores structured content, editable by users. What I was looking for was an online database accessible by everyone where people can design the schema and data with proper versioning of both schema and data. I couldn't find any such site. I am not sure if it is my search skills or if there really is no wiki database as of now. Does anyone out there know anything like this?
I think there is a great potential for something like this. A possible example will be a website with a GUI for querying a MySQL DB where any website visitor can create DB objects and populate data.
UPDATE: I had registered the domain wikidatabase.org to get started on a tool but I didn't find enough time yet. If anyone is interested in spending some time and coding on this, please let me know at wikidatabase.org
It's not quite what you're looking for, but Semantic Mediawiki adds database-like features to MediaWiki:
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
It's still fundamentally a Wiki, but you can add semantic tags to pages ([[foo::bar]] [[baz::1000]]) and then do database-type queries across them: SELECT baz FROM pages WHERE foo=bar would be {{#ask: [[foo::bar]] | ?baz}}. There is even an embryonic SPARQL implementation for pseudo-SQL queries.
OK this question is old, but Google led me here, so for anyone else out there looking for a wiki for structured data: Take a look at Foswiki.
This might be like what you're looking for: dbpedia.org. They're working on extracting data from Wikipedia, and encoding it in a structured format using RDF, so that it can be queried using SPARQL.
Linkeddata.org has a big list of RDF data sets.
Do you mean something like http://www.freebase.com?
You should check out https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page which is a bit different but still may be of interest.
Something that might come close to your requirements is Google Docs.
What's offered is document editing roughly similar to MS Word, and spreadsheets roughly similar to Excel. I'm thinking of the latter, of course.
In Google Docs, You can create spreadsheets for free; being spreadsheets, they naturally have a row-and-column structure similar to a database, and which you can define flexibly. You can also share these sheets with other people. This seems to be a by-invite-only process rather than open-to-all, but there may be other possibilities I'm not aware of, or that level of sharing might be enough for you in any case.
mindtouch should be able to do it. It's rather easy to get data in / out. (for example: it's trivial to aggregate all the IP's for servers into one table).
I pretty much use it as a DB in the wiki itself (pages have tables, key/value..inheritance, templates, etc...) but you can also interface with the API, write dekiscript, grab the XML...
I like this idea. I have heard of some sites that are trying to pull together large datasets for various things for open consumption, but none that would allow a wiki feel.
You could start with something as simple as an installation of phpMyAdmin with a known password that would allow people to log in, create a database, edit data and query from any other site on the web.
It might suffer from more accuracy problems than wikipedia though.
OpenRecord, development of which seems to have halted in 2008, seems to approach this. It is a structured wiki in which pages are views on the data. Unlike RDBMSes it is loosely typed - the system tries to make a best guess about what data you entered, but defaults to text when it cannot guess. Schemas appear to have been implied.
http://openrecord.org
An example of the typing that is given is that of a date. If you enter '2008' in a record, the system interprets this as a date. If you enter 'unknown' however, the system allows that as well.
Perhaps you might be interested in Couch DB:
Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented
database that can be queried and
indexed in a MapReduce fashion using
JavaScript. CouchDB also offers
incremental replication with
bi-directional conflict detection and
resolution.
I'm working on an Open Source PHP / Symfony / PostgreSQL app that does this.
It allows multiple projects, each project can have multiple directories, each directory has a defined field structure. Admins set all this up.
Then members of the public can suggest new records, edit or report existing ones. All this is moderated and versioned.
It's early days yet but it basically works and is already in real world use in several projects.
Future plans already in progress include tools to help keep the data up to date, better searching/querying and field types that allow translations of content between languages.
There is more at http://www.directoki.org/
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Wikibase yet, which is the software that powers Wikidata.