Sparna Blog » 03-Technologie
type: channel
description: Web de données | Architecture de l'information | Accès aux connaissances
date: 2025-06-03T10:30:27Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Sparnatural as a simple data federation facade
items: European Parliament Open Data Portal : a SHACL-powered knowledge graph
items: The Genesis of Sparnatural in the context of the OpenArchaeo platform
items: Retour sur … Le déploiement de Sparnatural pour FranceArchives
items: Nakala : from an RDF dataset to a query UI in minutes – SHACL automated generation and Sparnatural
items: Sparnatural SHACL configuration : manual, automated, off-the-shelf
items: Sparnatural : say it with SHACL !
items: CORDIS : a SPARQL endpoint is born !
items: 2013-2023 : ‘Tis SKOSPlay!’s Birthday !
items: Dashboards from SPARQL knowledge graphs using Looker Studio (Google Data Studio)

Sparnatural as a simple data federation facade
type: item
date: 2025-06-03T10:30:27Z
creator: Thomas Francart
subject: Sparnatural
subject: SPARQL
description: Together with the FAIR-data-evangelists of the MSH Val-de-Loire, we rencently worked on the v2 of the OpenArchaeo portal that uses Sparnatural as its core visual data exploration component (the v2 is not yet visible, but hopefully will be finalized and announced soon !) It uses a new feature of Sparnatural : the ability to act… Cet article Sparnatural as a simple data federation facade est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Together with the FAIR-data-evangelists of the MSH Val-de-Loire, we rencently worked on the v2 of the OpenArchaeo portal that uses Sparnatural as its core visual data exploration component (the v2 is not yet visible, but hopefully will be finalized and announced soon !) It uses a new feature of Sparnatural : the ability to act as a single UI facade to multiple SPARQL endpoints. The user visually writes a single query, the query is sent to multiple data sources, and results are aggregated to be presented to the user in a single result set, that includes each result provenance. This is depicted in the diagram below: The user writes his query visually in Sparnatural, here « All archaelogical sites where burials have been found, with the name of their discoverer, if known » : The visual query is translated into SPARQL, and that SPARQL query is sent to each data source in the federation (actually, the user can select the ones he wants to query). This is depicted by the green arrows in the diagram, numbered « 1 ». The SPARQL query looks like the following; note how it uses complex CIDOC-CRM property paths, such as the highlighted one, while the visual user query was simple: Each SPARQL service returns a result. This is depicted by the orange arrows in the diagram, numbered « 2 ». When every endpoint have answered, their results are aggregated into a single result set. This is number « 3 » in the diagram. During this aggregation, an extra column is added in the result set, containing the name of the source from which the result was retrieved. The user sees the aggregated result; here, the name of the site, the name of its discovered when known, and the source in which the result was found: This is possible thanks to the catalog configuration of Sparnatural. Sparnatural can be passed a catalog of SPARQL endpoints in a federation, and in this case, it will send the same SPARQL query to each, and will aggregate the results. This happens for the final query of course, but also…

European Parliament Open Data Portal : a SHACL-powered knowledge graph
type: item
date: 2025-04-09T14:10:12Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: Editeurs
subject: FAIR
subject: Linked Data
subject: Non classé
subject: Ontologies
subject: Open Data
subject: SHACL
subject: SHACL Play
subject: api
subject: DCAT
subject: ELI
subject: google spreadsheets
subject: json-ld
subject: knowledge graph
subject: SKOS
subject: SPARQL
description: A second usecase Thomas wrote for Veronika Heimsbakk’s SHACL for the Practitioner upcoming book is about Sparna’s work for the European Parliament. From validation of the data in the knowledge graph to further projects of data integration and dissemination, many different usages of SHACL specifications were explored… … and more exploratory usages of SHACL are foreseen ! “… Cet article European Parliament Open Data Portal : a SHACL-powered knowledge graph est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: A second usecase Thomas wrote for Veronika Heimsbakk’s SHACL for the Practitioner upcoming book is about Sparna’s work for the European Parliament. From validation of the data in the knowledge graph to further projects of data integration and dissemination, many different usages of SHACL specifications were explored… … and more exploratory usages of SHACL are foreseen ! “ A knowledge-graph powered open data portal The European Parliament Open Data Portal (EPODP) went live in January 2023. Its particularity is that it is not a mere aggregation of documents or dump files from business applications in custom formats; but rather a collection of datasets each extracted from a central semantic knowledge graph, itself aggregating data migrated from approximately twenty business applications. The result is a semantically interoperable open data portal : the semantic of its data model is clearly defined and documented, and reuses widely deployed existing ontologies. It already provides its data to different consumers (most notably the europarl website and the EU law tracker) in a context of cross-institutions interoperability. The data captures the activity of the parliament : as co-legislator together with the Council of the EU, the European Parliament (EP) holds plenary sittings, in which reports originating from committees, as well as motion for resolutions, are amended and voted; after the vote, the final adopted texts are published. The focus on semantic interoperability of EPODP maximizes the potential of reuse and linkage of its datasets, and maximizes the quality of the offered data. It comes however at a cost when building the portal : deep analysis and understanding of the existing data and documents structure is required to capture the business semantic. SHACL is the way to formally encode this business semantic – but how is it deployed in practice ? how is it maintained ? what are the different types of SHACL specifications used ? SHACL at the center of a model-d…

The Genesis of Sparnatural in the context of the OpenArchaeo platform
type: item
date: 2025-03-28T14:54:53Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: FAIR
subject: Linked Data
subject: Ontologies
subject: Open Data
subject: Recherche d'informations
subject: Sparnatural
subject: SPARQL
subject: Triplestores
subject: CIDOC-CRM
subject: Huma-Num
subject: ResearchSpace
subject: thesaurus
subject: Triplestore
description: The OpenArchaeo platform, developed by French consortium Huma-Num MASAplus (Mémoire des Archéologues et des Sites Archéologiques) together with SPARNA, is a platform dedicated to archaeological data interoperability. This semantic interoperability objective relies on the strong conceptual foundations offered by the CIDOC-CRM data model. Paired with the CIDOC-CRM in a federated way, OpenArchaeo aims at :… Cet article The Genesis of Sparnatural in the context of the OpenArchaeo platform est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: The OpenArchaeo platform, developed by French consortium Huma-Num MASAplus (Mémoire des Archéologues et des Sites Archéologiques) together with SPARNA, is a platform dedicated to archaeological data interoperability. This semantic interoperability objective relies on the strong conceptual foundations offered by the CIDOC-CRM data model. Paired with the CIDOC-CRM in a federated way, OpenArchaeo aims at : making available the archaeological datasets produced by the MASAplus consortium’s partners on the semantic web, in the form of a triplestore with data aligned with the ontology and its extensions dedicated to archaeology ; providing an intuitive query interface for archaeological data. The latter query interface integrates the Sparnatural knowledge graph exploration component. The UI of this component was heavily inspired by the British Museum’s ResearchSpace semantic search feature, as the system proposes the user to build his own queries based on the CIDOC-CRM model underlying the data. About ResearchSpace platform Initiated in 2009 by a cross-disciplinary team at the British Museum, ResearchSpace is « A full CIDOC-CRM authoring and search system, based on an exhaustive collection of forms that reflects all applicable relationships from the CIDOC CRM ontology. » Among a wide range of semantic tools to create, manipulate, analyse and visualise data, the platform provides a semantic structured search component based on categories and relations. While open source, ResearchSpace’s code didn’t fit our architecture : we just chose to follow the simple visual elements of ResearchSpace’s query interface to develop our own Sparnatural query builder for OpenArchaeo, and set up a system of icons to identify the main components of the archaeological data. ResearchSpace has recently (december 2024) released a brand new 4.0.0 version. This latest can be installed easily and now comes with a default setup of forms based on the CIDOC-CRM. It enables image annotations, knowledge m…

Retour sur … Le déploiement de Sparnatural pour FranceArchives
type: item
date: 2025-02-14T17:35:50Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: Linked Data
subject: Non classé
subject: Ontologies
subject: RDF
subject: Recherche d'informations
subject: Sparnatural
subject: SPARQL
subject: Visualisation de données
subject: archives
subject: EAC
subject: EAD
subject: EAG
subject: RiC-O
subject: schema.org
description: Voilà maintenant près d’un an et demi que FranceArchives, le Portail national des Archives de France, a annoncé le déploiement de l’outil « Supernatural » (comprendre Sparnatural) via ses réseaux, dans l’optique de proposer à ses usagers « un accès nouveau aux métadonnées archivistiques, complémentaire de la recherche classique par le moteur du portail ».… Cet article Retour sur … Le déploiement de Sparnatural pour FranceArchives est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Voilà maintenant près d’un an et demi que FranceArchives, le Portail national des Archives de France, a annoncé le déploiement de l’outil « Supernatural » (comprendre Sparnatural) via ses réseaux, dans l’optique de proposer à ses usagers « un accès nouveau aux métadonnées archivistiques, complémentaire de la recherche classique par le moteur du portail ». Porté par le Service interministériel des Archives de France, le portail FranceArchives offre une recherche fédérée dans près de 26 millions de métadonnées archivistiques produites par près de 170 institutions et entièrement sémantisées en RDF par le biais de l’ontologie RiC-O version 0.2 publiée en février 2021. C’est une des premières utilisations de RiC-O à grande échelle (même s’il faudra à l’avenir qu’il se mette à jour sur la version 1.0 de RiC-O publiée depuis !), et c’est également l’un des premiers entrepôts de données archivistiques de cette taille sur le Linked Open Data. … Un graphe de données qui a tout pour être « Supernaturalisé » Des données de qualité à une recherche augmentée … Enfin, il va surtout s’agir de ses « données de qualité », autrement dit les : inventaires avec leurs composants, notices descriptives de producteurs d’archives, fiches signalétiques des services d’archives, … tous objets liés à une autorité « personnes et institutions », « lieux » et « thèmes » de qualité (soit moins de 5% des métadonnées du portail avant conversion… et plus de 70% de l’ensemble du réservoir en RDF !), autorités de qualité elles-mêmes harmonisées et alignées vers des référentiels nationaux et internationaux. Modèle particulièrement adapté à la description des archives en RDF, c’est l’ontologie RiC-O (v0.2) qui a été utilisée pour la sémantisation des données XML EAD – XML EAC-CPF vers RDF, complétée de schema.org pour les fiches signalétiques des services de l’annuaire au format XML EAG. Les informations relatives aux archives et à leurs producteurs étant décrites dans des fichiers différents, la recherche…

Nakala : from an RDF dataset to a query UI in minutes – SHACL automated generation and Sparnatural
type: item
date: 2025-02-06T10:38:25Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: Linked Data
subject: Ontologies
subject: Recherche d'informations
subject: SHACL
subject: Sparnatural
subject: SPARQL
subject: Visualisation de données
subject: dcterms
subject: digital humanities
subject: EDM
subject: endpoint
subject: RDF
subject: UI
description: Here is a usecase of an automated version of Sparnatural submitted as an example for Veronika Heimsbakk’s SHACL for the Practitioner upcoming book about the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). “ The Sparnatural knowledge graph explorer leverages SHACL specifications to drive a user interface (UI) that allows end users to easily discover the content of an RDF graph. What… Cet article Nakala : from an RDF dataset to a query UI in minutes – SHACL automated generation and Sparnatural est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Here is a usecase of an automated version of Sparnatural submitted as an example for Veronika Heimsbakk’s SHACL for the Practitioner upcoming book about the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). “ The Sparnatural knowledge graph explorer leverages SHACL specifications to drive a user interface (UI) that allows end users to easily discover the content of an RDF graph. What is the best way to make this UI-oriented SHACL specification ? if a SHACL specification for the knowledge graph structure already exists, can it be used directly ? does it require customization ? or is the Sparnatural SHACL spec completely decoupled from an existing knowledge graph spec ? and what if no SHACL spec exists at all ? We faced all these different situations while deploying Sparnatural, and used various approaches to produce a satisfying end-user oriented specification. In particular, the Nakala repository is one of the latest graph for which Sparnatural was deployed. Nakala is a data repository that aims to preserve and disseminate data produced by French research projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in compliance with the FAIR principles. Nakala is a service offered by Huma-Num, a research infrastructure dedicated to the digital humanities. The Nakala knowledge graph contains `dcterms` metadata provided by researchers to describe the resources they upload. Additional non-dcterms metadata can also be provided. The metadata varies in quality and quantity depending on the researcher. When exposed in a SPARQL endpoint, resources, collections of resources and agents are described using the Europeana Data Model (EDM). As the EDM dissemination channel for Nakala was new, no SHACL specification existed for it. We could have designed one for Sparnatural from scratch, but the choice was make to generate it automatically, with no human intervention. This was for three reasons : ease of configuration, flexibility in maintenance over time, and pedagogical reason, as it was important to exp…

Sparnatural SHACL configuration : manual, automated, off-the-shelf
type: item
date: 2025-01-21T07:00:35Z
creator: Thomas Francart
subject: SHACL
subject: Sparnatural
subject: SPARQL
description: Sparnatural is a knowledge graph visual browser made for end-users. The user is guided in the creation of her graph traversal query by selecting the kind of entities she is searching, how these entities are connected to other entities in the graph, and which properties she would like to have in her result columns. The… Cet article Sparnatural SHACL configuration : manual, automated, off-the-shelf est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Sparnatural is a knowledge graph visual browser made for end-users. The user is guided in the creation of her graph traversal query by selecting the kind of entities she is searching, how these entities are connected to other entities in the graph, and which properties she would like to have in her result columns. The possible entities, connections and properties that are shown to the user need to be specified to Sparnatural. This configuration is written in a SHACL specification. This specification encodes both the structure of the knowledge graph (as we want it to be presented to the user), plus some additionnal UI-oriented information, like icons, order of entries, or value selection widgets to use. How can the SHACL configuration of Sparnatural be produced ? we faced 3 different situations : either we do it manually, or (semi-)automatically, or with an off-the-shelf specification complemented with manual annotations. We will give you a brief description of each possibility below. Write your SHACL manually (in Excel) SHACL has one main disadvantage : there is no widely available, free-to-use SHACL editor to create/edit these specs (while Protégé, for example, allows anyone to edit an OWL ontology). To overcome this lack of tool, we are using an Excel-to-SHACL conversion tool, xls2rdf. We (and our users) write the specification in an Excel template, that is then turned in SHACL by an API call to xls2rdf. This is what we described in a previous post. We have a good documentation on how to design your Sparnatural documentation in Excel, if you want to try it (but see the Hello Sparnatural tutorial first to setup your working test page). And we are here to help if you need to ! (ask questions on the Github repository). If you are looking for a general-purpose SHACL Excel template, there is one in SHACL Play. Get your SHACL automatically (statistics included) SHACL is machine-readable and also writable, so we can use our SHACL generation algorithm to produce a SHACL «…

Sparnatural : say it with SHACL !
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:02:59Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: SHACL
subject: Sparnatural
subject: DBpedia
subject: endpoint
subject: SPARQL
description: Do you Sparnatural ? If you follow us here, you may be familiar with our most well-known Sparnatural visual query builder. If not, have a look at the website and give us your impressions on it ! To make it short, Sparnatural is a client-side component that allows non-expert users to explore an RDF Knowledge Graph… Cet article Sparnatural : say it with SHACL ! est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Do you Sparnatural ? If you follow us here, you may be familiar with our most well-known Sparnatural visual query builder. If not, have a look at the website and give us your impressions on it ! To make it short, Sparnatural is a client-side component that allows non-expert users to explore an RDF Knowledge Graph by building SPARQL queries with little effort. Fully configurable – and customizable – it can be plugged to any existing SPARQL endpoint, without additional server required to adapt to your knowledge graph ontology. Innovative and intuitive, it aims at bringing your knowledge graph to your end-users in a visual way that « gamifies » the knowledge graph experience. Nb : Sparnatural is open source, under a LGPL-3.0 license. So far, the configuration was made through an OWL ontology… Sparnatural in SHACL ! … until now, But the times they are a-changin’ … You can now configure Sparnatural starting from a SHACL configuration spreadsheet ! SHACL in a nutshell Defined by a W3C Working Group, SHACL, as for « Shapes Constraint Language », is « a language for validating RDF graphs against a set of conditions. These conditions are provided as shapes and other constructs expressed in the form of an RDF graph. » First published in 2017, it has become a widely used standard to : describe structural constraints on data graphs ; validate that data graphs satisfy a set of conditions ; but also build user interface, generate code and integrate data ! The latter we will leverage for our brand new Sparnatural SHACL configuration. Yes, in a spreadsheet ! SHACL may be quite unfamiliar for our users. A good thing is you don’t need to be a SHACL expert to build your SHACL-shaped Sparnatural configuration. Indeed ! the entire configuration is done via a spreadsheet whose columns correspond to the SHACL model. Still, you can observe that all the Sparnatural features are here : the nodes & the edges of the knowledge graph, of course ; its labels and literal attributes (different kind…

CORDIS : a SPARQL endpoint is born !
type: item
date: 2024-01-15T08:55:41Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: Linked Data
subject: Ontologies
subject: Open Data
subject: SPARQL
subject: Thesaurus
subject: Triplestores
subject: Visualisation de données
subject: endpoint
subject: Europe
subject: Linked Open Data
subject: ontologie
subject: ontologies
subject: thesaurus
description: Another star to light on EU’s linked open data maturity flag ! 🌟 Not talking about 2024 exceptional Northern Lights to come, but this one’s also good news for science ! ➡️ Late 2023, the Publications Office of the European Union announced on social media the public release of the new CORDIS SPARQL endpoint. CORDIS, aka « the Community… Cet article CORDIS : a SPARQL endpoint is born ! est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Another star to light on EU’s linked open data maturity flag ! Not talking about 2024 exceptional Northern Lights to come, but this one’s also good news for science ! ➡️ Late 2023, the Publications Office of the European Union announced on social media the public release of the new CORDIS SPARQL endpoint. CORDIS, aka « the Community Research and Development Information Service of the European Commission », is « the […] primary source of results from the projects funded by the EU’s framework programmes for research and innovation, from FP1 to Horizon Europe ». Described as a « rich and structured public repository with all project information held by the European Commission such as project factsheets, participants, reports, deliverables and links to open-access publications », the CORDIS catalog has also been made available in 6 European languages by Publications Office’s editorial team. Cherry on top of a whole process, the CORDIS SPARQL endpoint release comes to crown a long-term linked open data project. The aim identifying, acquiring, preserving and providing access to knowledge in a common will to share with the widest public possible a trust-worthy, qualified and structured information (see Publications Office 2021 Annual Management Report). In the context of the pandemic (and recent opening of data.europa.eu, the official portal for European data, as defined in 2017–2025 European Open Data Space strategy), the EuroSciVoc taxonomy of fields of science was released April 2020, followed December 2021 by the publishing of European research information ontology (EURIO) on the EU Vocabularies website . As presented at ENDORSE conference March 2021, the redesign of CORDIS data-model in accordance with Semantic Web standards contributed to bring the platform « from acting as a data repository to finally playing an active role as data provider », where EuroSciVoc taxonomy & EURIO ontology both played key roles in the creation of future CORDIS knowledge graph and SPARQL…

2013-2023 : ‘Tis SKOSPlay!’s Birthday !
type: item
date: 2023-03-13T14:28:53Z
creator: Marie Muller
subject: Linked Data
subject: Ontologies
subject: OWL
subject: RDF
subject: SHACL
subject: SHACL Play
subject: SKOS
subject: SKOS Play
subject: Thesaurus
subject: Visualisation de données
subject: ontologie
subject: skos play
subject: thesaurus
subject: web sémantique
description: Hi, it’s Marie (aka chutjetweet here). To be short I’m a documentalist, terminologist, old (linked – open) data maniac & lil’ onto-Padawan and… just came to join Sparna’s team this early January ! To inaugurate my first article on Sparna’s blog, let’s share a little feedback of mine today about Sparna’s well-known SKOSPlay! whose 10 years’ birthday… Cet article 2013-2023 : ‘Tis SKOSPlay!’s Birthday ! est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: Hi, it’s Marie (aka chutjetweet here). To be short I’m a documentalist, terminologist, old (linked – open) data maniac & lil’ onto-Padawan and… just came to join Sparna’s team this early January ! To inaugurate my first article on Sparna’s blog, let’s share a little feedback of mine today about Sparna’s well-known SKOSPlay! whose 10 years’ birthday is to celebrate this year ! 10 yo, quite a historic tool ! but more than ever actual in a context where the semantic technologies get front of the scene anew due to growing interest shown by the digital humanities movement to data interoperability projects via the standardized knowledge structuration (Wikipedia-Wikidata projects e.g., as semantic wiki devices), and also due to the last progress of artificial intelligence, now able to processing large amount of data and soon fully leveraging the potential of ontologies and knowledge graphs. From asking for a taxonomy to querying RDF files with an API… This said, in a more practical way, semantic web standards are not always easy to manipulate as a professional – if non-initiate to SPARQL and nor confirmed data scientist, and even when you have got to deal with a simple structured list of terms ! Either your data is already SKOS-standardized (great !), there sometimes come to have a gap between normalization step and visualization step that requires a bit more technical IT skills. Either – most of time – the common muggle-born is to start with a plain Excel spreadsheet, create a list, add some hierarchy, maybe other scope notes or definitions and… end far puzzled wondering how to get a 5-star data vocabulary ⭐ ! A SKOSPlay!-within-a-SKOSPlay! Wink to @belett, anything possible now with SKOSPlay! Aiming at visualizing (and printing !) SKOS thesauri, taxonomies and vocabularies at the very beginning, SKOSPlay! is a full online free and open source tool leveraging semantic technologies (RDF, SPARQL, inference, Linked Data) to generate downloadable HTML or PDF documents. More a…

Dashboards from SPARQL knowledge graphs using Looker Studio (Google Data Studio)
type: item
date: 2022-10-18T13:02:38Z
creator: Thomas Francart
subject: 02-Outils
subject: SPARQL
subject: dashboards
subject: RDF
description: You want to demonstrate the content of your knowledge graph accessible in SPARQL ? You can easily use dashboard tools, such as Looker studio (formerly Google Data Studio) which require no development and is free to use. Of course, Sparnatural is another possible solution ! This guide will describe every step you need to know… Cet article Dashboards from SPARQL knowledge graphs using Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) est apparu en premier sur Sparna Blog.
encoded: You want to demonstrate the content of your knowledge graph accessible in SPARQL ? You can easily use dashboard tools, such as Looker studio (formerly Google Data Studio) which require no development and is free to use. Of course, Sparnatural is another possible solution ! This guide will describe every step you need to know in order to create a Looker Studio Dashboard from SPARQL queries. All along, an example will be shown to illustrate all the steps with screenshots, code text and quotes. Step 1 : Getting the SPARQL Connector Looker Studio does not provide any native connector for SPARQL. But a community connector exists, called SPARQL Connector, made by Datafabrics LLC, that can be used to create the data source. You can find it by searching for community connectors, or use this link. The code is available in this Github repository. You have to grant access to your Google account for SPARQL Connector before using it. You will be able to find it in the connectors panel, in the Partner Connectors section, for your next queries. Step 2 : Connect your knowledge graph From your report, click on “Add Data” on the bottom right of the screen to open the connector panel. Select the SPARQL Connector in the connector panel (you can also search for it by entering “sparql” in the research field). Then, follow the steps to create your own data source: Enter the URL of the SPARQL endpoint (the endpoint must be publicly accessible, without authentication), for example, with DBPedia: https://dbpedia.org/sparql Then enter the SPARQL query, for example the following selects countries, their capital city label and their total population: PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> PREFIX dbr: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/> PREFIX dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/> SELECT ?capital_city_label ?country_label ?population WHERE { ?capital_city dbo:type dbr:Capital_city. ?capital_city rdfs:label ?capital_city_label. ?capital_city dbo:country ?country. ?country rdfs:label ?count…