A SPARQL DESCRIBE statement provides a simple mechanism for obtaining the description of an entity. Unfortunately, the SPARQL standard (as it currently stands) doesn’t provide clarity about what constitutes the description of an entity.
While the situation above remains, we offer a variety of DESCRIBE MODE pragmas for handling different kinds of Entity Descriptions as per our documentation.
We also have a Symmetric Concise Bounded Description (SCBD mode) which isn’t currently documented. This variant of an Entity Description is a combination of OBJCBD and CBD i.e., the description comprises relations where the entity being described is either the object or subject (rather than one or the other).
Example
Source document: https://kingsley.idehen.net/public_home/kidehen/Public/Linked%20Data%20Documents/Tutorials/cbd-graph.rdf
SPARQL DESCRIBE Query using SCBD pragma
DEFINE sql:describe-mode "SCBD"
DESCRIBE <http://example.com/anotherGreatBook>
Query Results [Live Link]
Related
- Concise Bounded Descriptions – original W3C submission doc in relation to RDF i.e., predates existence of SPARQL
- Linked Data Principles Document – this doc by TimBL makes reference to the utility of SCBDs
- SPARQL DESCRIBE – from SPARQL specification