#sparcool

While I was wondering how to embed SPARCool results in webpages without having to rely on server-scripting (namely PHP) nor facing AJAX cross-domain security issues, I got two requests asking if it could support JSONP. I figured out it was exactly what I was looking for, so a big thanks to Claudia and Rob for suggesting it !

It was quite straightforward to implement, and SPARCool now supports JSONP callbacks. So, one can call results using AJAX to dynamically embed SPARCool results in webpages (for instance, jQuery provides an easy way to use JSONP with it). It hence allows to construct dynamic pages using Linked Data resources without having to type any line of SPARQL code (e.g. listing members of a project, description of a resource, etc.). For instance, check the updated sparcool.net page and the new example at the bottom, listing - on runtime - all the members of the Clash, via a DBpedia through a SPARCool URL.

I've just wrote a Drupal module for SPARCool, which allows to embed SPARCool results in Drupal nodes, so that you can reuse any data from the LOD cloud to enhance your webpages !

It simply works by using the following pattern in your pages [ sparcool | predicate | URI ] (without any space), that is translated to a JSONP callback to the SPARCool service, et voilà ! You can also add a ;l=xx parameter after the property if you want to limit the query to a particular language.

For instance, I can include some bands members in this blog post, from DBPedia:

[sparcool|dbp:currentMembers|http://dbpedia.org/resource/Beastie_Boys]

As well as the abstract of a paper, from the Semantic Web Dog Food:

[sparcool|swrc:abstract|http://data.semanticweb.org/workshop/scripting/2008/paper/12]

Or the list of my last.fm contacts, from DBTune:

[sparcool|foaf:knows|http://dbtune.org/last-fm/terraces]

The Drupal project is hosted at http://drupal.org/project/sparcool, you can get the source via CVS. In addition, I also wrote a tiny JavaScript function (that is used in this module - and requires JQuery if you want to use it separately) that can help to include such results in any page. Finally, SPARCool now relies on prefix.cc to fetch the prefixes.

Have fun with Linked Open Data !