Gravsearch: Transforming SPARQL to query humanities data

Abstract

RDF triplestores have become an appealing option for storing and publishing humanities data, but available technologies for querying this data have drawbacks that make them unsuitable for many applications. Gravsearch (Virtual Graph Search), a SPARQL transformer developed as part of a web-based API, is designed to support complex searches that are desirable in humanities research, while avoiding these disadvantages. It does this by introducing server software that mediates between the client and the triplestore, transforming an input SPARQL query into one or more queries executed by the triplestore. This design suggests a practical way to go beyond some limitations of the ways that RDF data has generally been made available.