A SPARQL 1.1 Query Builder for the Data Analytics of Vanilla RDF Graphs

As more and more data are available as RDF graphs, the availability of tools for data analytics beyond semantic search becomes a key issue of the Semantic Web. Previous work has focused on adapting OLAP-like approaches and question answering by modelling RDF data cubes on top of RDF graphs. We propose a more direct – and more expressive – approach by guiding users in the incremental building of SPARQL 1.1 queries that combine several computation features (aggregations, expressions, bindings and filters), and by evaluating those queries on unmodified (vanilla) RDF graphs. We rely on the N<A>F design pattern to hide SPARQL behind a natural language interface, and to provide results and suggestions at every step. We have implemented our approach on top of Sparklis, and we report on three experiments to assess its expressivity, usability, and scalability