Question posed by Dan Brickley via a blog post: SQL, OpenOffice: would a JDBC driver for SPARQL protocol make sense?

Writing a JDBC Driver for SPARQL is a little overkill. OpenOffice.org simply needs to make XML or Web Data (HTML, XHTML, and XML) bonafide data sources within its "Pivot Table" functionality realm. Then all that would then be required is a SPARQL SELECT Query transported via the SPARQL Protocol with results sent back using the SPARQL XML results serialization format (all part of a single SPARQL Protocol URL).

Excel successfully consumes the following information resource URI: http://tinyurl.com/yvoccj (a tiny url for a SPARQL SELECT against my FOAF file).

Alternatively, and currently achievable, you could simply use SPASQL (SPARQL within SQL) using a DBMS engine that supports SQL, SPARQL, and SPARQL e.g. Virtuoso.

Virtuoso SPASQL support is exposed via it's ODBC and/or JDBC Drivers. Thus you can do things such as:

  1. Use a SPARQL Query in the FROM CLAUSE of a SQL statement
  2. Execute SPARQL via SQL processor by prepending SPARQL query text with the literals "sparql"

BTW - My News Years Resolution: get my act together and shrink the ever increasing list of "simple & practical Virtuoso use case demos" on my todo which now spans all the way back to 2006 :-(