sparql-query is a command-line tool for accessing SPARQL endpoints over HTTP

Dependencies:

You will need at least glib, libcurl, GNU readline, and libxml2, on a Unix-like
system.


It has been intentionally designed to 'feel' similar to tools for
interrogating SQL databases. For example, you can enter a query over several
lines, using a semi-colon at the end of a line to indicate the end of your
query.  It also supports readline so that you can more easily recall and edit
previous queries, even across sessions. It can be used non-interactively, for
example from a shell script. It doesn't have difficult or hard to find
dependencies so it should build fairly easily on typical Unix-like systems.

You can find a list of some existing public SPARQL endpoints on the ESW wiki
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SparqlEndpoints

For example, to access the DBpedia endpoint, which contains knowledge
gleaned from Wikipedia, you would type:

sparql-query http://dbpedia.org/sparql


sparql-query can be run non-interactively by specifying your entire SPARQL
query as the last parameter to the command. In this case you should terminate
the query with a semi-colon. The query will be executed and the results
streamed to standard out. You may need to be careful with any quoting rules
in your shell if using sparql-query this way directly from the command line
or a script, due to SPARQL making a lot of use of symbols that are meaningful
to the shell.

You can specify a MIME type to be used in the Accept: line for the HTTP
query in a SPARQL query, as a hint to the endpoint about your preferred
format. In non-interactive mode the default is the SPARQL results format,
application/sparql-results+xml  when interactive the default is text/plain
and the sparql-query program will translate SPARQL results format into a more
humane format for display.

ToDo

Add some way to do PUT uploading of RDF to compliant stores, maybe?


sparql-query was developed by Nick Lamb and Steve Harris at Garlik. You are
welcome to modify, copy and redistribute this software under the terms of the
GNU GPL which is included in the file COPYING.