APIs¶

The URL source type can also be used to extract records from online endpoints and APIs.

The following code snippet extracts records from a TriplyDB RESTful API:

fromJson(Source.url('https://api.triplydb.com/datasets')),

Raw SPARQL endpoints¶

SPARQL endpoints are online APIs. The following code snippet issues a raw SPARQL query against a public SPARQL endpoint. Since we specified CSV as the result set format (Media Type text/csv), the result set can be accessed as any other CSV source:

fromCsv(
  Source.url(
    'https://dbpedia.org/sparql',
    {
      request: {
        headers: {
          accept: 'text/csv',
          'content-type': 'application/query-string',
        },
        body: 'select * { ?s ?p ?o. } limit 1',
        method: 'POST',
      },
    }
  )
)

Use in production systems¶

Raw SPARQL endpoints lack several features that are essential for use in production systems: - secure access control - pagination - reliable retrieval of large result sets - API variables - versioning

These features are all supported by TriplyDB queries. It is therefore simpler and safer to use TriplyDB queries. Still, when used outside of production systems, raw SPARQL endpoints can still be used as regular web APIs.