=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-368/paper-13
|storemode=property
|title=SPARQLBot - The Semantic Web Command Line
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-368/paper7.pdf
|volume=Vol-368
}}
==SPARQLBot - The Semantic Web Command Line==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-368/paper7.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
        SPARQLBot: The Semantic Web Command Line
             (Scripting Challenge Submission)

                                        Benjamin Nowack

                        semsol, Bielefelder Str. 5, 40468 Düsseldorf, Germany
                                        bnowack@semsol.com



       Abstract. SPARQLBot is an RDF-driven agent that loads structured
       information from the Web and reacts to user-defined questions and commands
       via an IRC interface. The bot is implemented using a small number of PHP
       scripts and ARC, an open-source PHP/MySQL-based RDF system for storage
       and query functionality.




1 Motivation

SPARQLBot was developed during a single-day coding session to demonstrate a) the
              1


potential of tools that support structured and linked Web data, b) the developer-
friendliness of SPARQL, and c) how very little custom code can be used to build
useful applications. It consists of three core user interface components: An HTML-
based command editor that simplifies the definition of custom bot operations, a long-
running process that listens to command calls on an IRC channel , and a standard
                                                                            2


SPARQL endpoint for simplified debugging of SPARQL Queries and HTTP-based
                    3


data access.


2 Implementation

SPARQLBot is built on top of two open-source toolkits. For core RDF functionality
(RDF storage, parsing, microformats extraction, querying, etc.), it uses ARC , a light-
                                                                                   4


weight RDF toolkit written in PHP, and the user-facing applications are implemented
as Trice modules. Trice is a Web development framework that extends ARC with
         5


session management, HTML forms processing, IRC access, themes, and similar
standard Web CMS functionality.


1  http://semsol.org/semcamp/sparqlbot, to be moved to http://sparqlbot.semsol.org/ soon
2  #sparqlbot on http://irc.freenode.net/
3  http://semsol.org/semcamp/sparqlbot/sparql, to be moved to
  http://sparqlbot.semsol.org/bot/sparql soon
4  http://arc.semsol.org/
5  http://trice.semsol.org/
2    Benjamin Nowack


The SPARQLBot-specific code consists of only four custom PHP Classes (~25KB /
800 LOC altogether). A generic RequestHandler dispatches HTTP requests to the
three user-facing Sub-Handlers (the IRC ProcessHandler that implements the bot, a
Command Editor, and the SPARQL endpoint). Only very few commands had to be
built directly into the bot (e.g. "quit", or "smush"). As ARC supports LOAD,
INSERT, and DELETE via SPARQL, both read and write operations can be defined
using the command editor.


3 Examples: XFN Lookups

XFN , the "Xhtml Friends Network" is a widely deployed microformat to specify a
     6                                                              7


person's social network in XHTML pages. SPARQLBot's RDF toolkit can convert
XFN markup to RDF triples and then make them accessible to SPARQL queries. The
code below shows the command's essential parts which can be defined using an
online form.

Command Pattern (a regular expression):
      (.*)'s? (contact|friend|me)s

Triggered SPARQL Query ($i can be used for command matches):
      SELECT DISTINCT ?name WHERE {
        {?res foaf:nick "$1"} UNION {?res foaf:name "$1"}
        ?res xfn:$2 [ foaf:name ?name ] .
      }

Result Template ($var can be used for result bindings):
      $nick, I found {$name, }


Example Conversation:

      <bengee> sparqlbot, load http://twitter.com/bengee
      <sparqlbot> 290 triples loaded in 4.9s seconds
      <bengee> sparqlbot, smush
      <sparqlbot> OK
      <bengee> sparqlbot, Benjamin Nowack's contacts
      <sparqlbot> bengee, I found Danny Ayers, Tom,
      Gregory Williams, Arto Bendiken, Paul Miller, John
      Breslin,Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant, ...




6   http://gmpg.org/xfn/
7   http://microformats.org/

</pre>