Enabling the Distributed Family Tree

This is the official research blog for the Distributed Family Tree, an open network of genealogical data and metadata.  In a nutshell, the big idea is that we can combine all available genealogical information on the Internet into a single distributed network.  The foundation for this network is the substance of the Master's Thesis that I am currently working on.

SPARQL Syntax Coloring and Errors

As the Good Doctor’s students have probably never even heard of RDF in their entire life, I thought it would be nice to provide a little help for them.  That and I’ve wanted to tinker with Eclipse’s syntax coloring for a while now (probably the real reason).  Voila:

SPARQL Syntax Coloring

You’ll also notice that the solutions at the bottom can be sorted now.  This is a great benefit because when the ORDER BY clause is used in a SPARQL query, all the solutions are collected before they can be sorted and finally displayed, which can take quite a long time.  But when you sort on a column instead, the solutions are sorted as they arrive.

Rather than throw an exception when a bad query is executed, I thought it would be nice to provide a little feedback here as well:

SPARQL Syntax Error

(Don’t strain your eyes, the error is a missing semicolon on the tenth line.) 

Originally I tried underlining just the part that is incorrect, but the ARQ SPARQL parser returns inconsistent line and column numbers.  So I just settled on underlining the entire query.  When an ORDER BY clause is used, the query is underlined with a yellow squiggle with hover text that suggests clicking a column header instead (the query is still executed, however).

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