The Semantic Web made fun: d3sparql

Continuing my on-again off-again relationship with the Semantic Web, I stumbled across a cool approach to visualising the results of SPARQL queries. Toshiaki Katayama (@tktym) has put together d3sparql, a set of Javascript scripts that takes SPARQL queries and formats the results graphically using D3.

For example, give the SPARQL endpoint http://togostanza.org/sparql, the following query retrieves the NCBI classification for the tardigrade family Hypsibiidae:

PREFIX rdfs: PREFIX up: SELECT ?root_name ?parent_name ?child_name FROM <http://togogenome.org/graph/uniprot> WHERE { VALUES ?root_name { "Hypsibiidae" } ?root up:scientificName ?root_name . ?child rdfs:subClassOf+ ?root . ?child rdfs:subClassOf ?parent . ?child up:scientificName ?child_name . ?parent up:scientificName ?parent_name . }

By outputting the results as a list of parent-child pairs, it is straightforward to convert the output of this query into a form that D3 accepts, so we can get a tree like this:

The ability to quickly generate trees, charts, and maps from SPARQL queries makes things a lot easier. We can play around a little and explore things. The strength (and challenge) of SPARQL is that it is very open-ended, you can more or less develop queries to do anything. Being able to visualise the results will help guide that exploration.

The code for d3sparql is on GitHub. One "gotcha" is that the cached examples and external Javascript libraries aren't included. I've forked the repository here and added the missing files, so that if you grab that version it works straight out of the box.