Teaching RDF

I recently held a 90min lecture on RDF. In it, I’ve followed the obvious path of explaining the usefulness of RDF by showing how it can be interpreted in several ways (set of triples, resources, graph). For a hands-on session, I needed a way to interactively create and query RDF, so I’ve added functionality to Hyena: In the “Query” zone, one can edit a graph in Turtle Syntax and query the repository with SPARQL. It turned out that there was a nice synergy between this zone and the rest of Hyena, because the encoded wiki pages plus attached tags provided nice “real-world” example data. As an exercise, I asked my audience to express in SPARQL the query “all wiki pages that are tagged with ‘Todo’”.
Update: More RDF shells

• sparql-query: A shell for accessing SPARQL endpoints. [Source: Mischa Tuffield]
• OntoWiki has an interactive query shell with SPARQL syntax highlightning, saved queries and other features. [Source: Sebastian Tramp]
• The SparqlTrainer is an e-learning tool to practice SPARQL interactively. [Source: Sebastian Tramp]

Related reading:

• Free text book on RDF (foundation of Semantic Web)

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