12 July 2011, London - TSO, the leading provider of publishing solutions to the public sector and part of the Williams Lea Group, has today announced the release into the developer community of what is believed to be the most feature-rich web-based SPARQL editor available, the Flint SPARQL Editor. Unlike many existing web-based SPARQL query building tools, which lack abilities such as context dependent autocompletion or syntax checking, Flint encompasses many of the features developers would expect of traditional development environments and code parsers, through its web implementation.  Flint, version 0.5, is available via TSO’s OpenUpLabs at http://openuplabs.tso.co.uk/demos/sparqleditor. (A full list of features can be seen in Notes To Editors).

Currently, those submitting SPARQL queries via a web page are generally presented with a bland text box, which can make the process very frustrating and time consuming for less experienced users, especially if they have a limited understanding of the SPARQL language or the structure of the RDF endpoints they are working with. Flint 0.5 overcomes these challenges through a variety of context-sensitive features, as well as automatically establishing the properties and classes of CORS-enabled endpoints, when available, and presenting these as collections to the user. Flint can be easily incorporated into any web page.

“We believed that web-based SPARQL editors had woefully underserved the community and in some respects were holding back its mainstream development, that was our starting point for developing Flint,” said Terry Blake, Technical Services Director at TSO. “We wanted to see how feature-rich we could make a web-based SPARQL editor, so that it helped users to code, rather than simply being a vehicle that offered no assistance, checking or support for executing code on a dataset.

“As the community grows and RDF makes its way into organisations across the globe, SPARQL needs to be accessible by all manner of users, with as few barriers to entry as possible. Flint is the start of our journey to make that happen.  We’re looking forward to getting feedback from the community on this version of Flint,” Blake concluded.

There are many more features planned for inclusion in future versions of Flint such as name autocompletion, semantic consistency checking and dataset specific help.

Flint is just one element in a comprehensive package of harvesting, enrichment, storage/management and outputting tools featured at http://openup.tso.co.uk. TSO’s OpenUp platform is a collection of integrated services available as Software as a Service (SaaS) allowing fast deployment at a reasonable cost. Together, the services provide a highly scalable and resilient platform that allows the storage, retrieval, querying and enrichment of data for use in linked, machine-readable formats.

Flint is being made available under the terms of the MIT free software license (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and incorporates the CodeMirror 2 JavaScript library.

ENDS

Notes to Editors

Version 0.5 includes a fully re-written parser enabling the following features:

• Improved parser performance
• Context dependent autocomplete – pressing ctrl-space provides a menu of options based on what is syntactically valid at the cursor. If the token at the cursor should be a property, then a menu of prefixed properties from the dataset is given
• Context-dependent keyword buttons – the SPARQL keyword buttons are enabled only for keywords valid at the current cursor position

Flint features:

• Fully configurable and can be easily embedded into any web page
• Query can be targeted to any CORS-enabled endpoint named via an interface or pre-configured endpoints (e.g. OpenUpLabs endpoints). Non-CORS endpoints are also accepted if running on the same domain as Flint
• Editor automatically fetches the properties and classes from the endpoint once established
• Syntax error detection – error underlined and line highlighted in left margin. Queries can only be submitted if error-free
• Coloured syntax highlighting with auto-indentation
• Cut / paste / undo / redo
• Query type detection – drop-downs for selecting output formats contain only those options appropriate for the type of query written
• Query templates pre-populated with declarations of namespaces from the selected dataset
• Slide-out toolbox on the UI contains a selection of building blocks for insertion into queries:
  • SPARQL keywords
  • Properties (discovered from dataset)
  • Classes (discovered from dataset)
  • Prefixes (the standard prefixes for the namespaces found in dataset)
  • Sample queries (if pre-configured)

About TSO
TSO (The Stationery Office) is the leading provider of information management and publishing solutions to the public sector. We are the largest publisher by volume in the UK, publishing more than 8,000 titles a year in print and digital formats. Our experts help to create, structure, capture, transform and deliver some of the most important government information. TSO provides services, consultancy and infrastructure to deliver all aspects of the information lifecycle to the highest standards for our clients.

TSO has been at the forefront of working with public sector clients to open up published data. We create tools and processes to allow data to be created in a structured way; enrich data using text engineering techniques; convert data into formats to publish as linked data on the web and provide and host web environments that allow both humans and machines to access the data.

TSO was acquired in 2007 by Williams Lea, the leading global provider of Corporate Information Solutions.

For more information visit www.tso.co.uk  

For further information please contact:

Duncan Gurney / Victoria Melville
Melville Communications
+44 (0)1483 489009/07974 161 123
duncan@melvillecommunications.co.uk / Victoria@melvillecommunications.co.uk