Weekly summary 2021-01-07

Carolinei · January 8, 2021, 9:38am

Here’s a recap of some highlights from our weekly activities in 2020.

A full listing of our weekly updates from 2020 can be found here.

How many clicks does it take to generate a highly functional Knowledge Graph using OpenLink Virtuoso? Just one! Learn how.
Here is a quick note about an end- or power-user level productivity tool for bringing the power of Knowledge Graph look-ups to existing content in your browser.

Bringing the FORCE of the LOD Cloud Knowledge Graph to the COVID-19 pandemic — This post is about leveraging the combined power of Open Data and Linked Data during these challenging times. The effect is a reduction in the amount of Data Wrangling overhead, aiding subject-matter experts, researchers, government departments, medical professionals, and many others who are on the front lines of this global pandemic.

ODBC and JDBC Access to COVID-19 Cloud Knowledge Graph — provides a complete guide to using ODBC & JDBC compliant apps and services (e.g., Dashboards, Business Intelligence Tools, Data Science Notebooks, etc.) for transparent access to the LOD Cloud Knowledge Graph via our URIBurner Service using our Free 90 Day Virtuoso ODBC & JDBC Driver License Offer.

Collaborative platforms like Google Spreadsheet have been invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic, serving as a bridge for constructing Data Wrangling templates in conjunction with actual Data Publication & Sharing. That said, they too have limitations as outlined and addressed in a recent post titled “Data-Wrangling and Progressive LOD Cloud Knowledge Graph Enhancement — Beyond Spreadsheets” by Kingsley Idehen, our CEO.

What is an OpenLink Multi-Tier ODBC to JDBC bridge Driver and why is it important?
For starters it is the only driver to include a rules engines for enhanced security alongside high-performance. Here are some important guides for understanding and using our powerful Bridge Drivers/Connectors.

Linked Data, Ontology, and Knowledge Graph Explainer — This post by Kingsley Idehen is a collection of simple explanations combined with embedded use-case demonstration screencasts.
Demonstrating that you don’t need to be a Programmer to learn RDF and/or exploit deployment using Linked Data principles or to create and publish content on the Web that’s deployed using Linked Data principles.

Data inconsistency is a major source of Data Quality challenges that provide headaches to both application developers and end-users in a variety of way. Fundamentally, data represented as Tables or Graphs are susceptible to these problems. Read our community forum note and join the discussion about this important topic.
Our CEO (@kidehen) comments frequently about Explainable AI and the role of an Ontology with regards to informing Reasoning & Inference. Here is a Twitter Thread that delves into this important topic using Virtuoso and a live Knowledge Graph (comprising Linked Data).

What is a Virtuoso SPARQL Endpoint, and why is it important?

A Virtuoso SPARQL endpoint is a major feature of every Virtuoso instance that delivers on the promise of increased expressivity and data access dexterity required by any Knowledge Graph (Enterprise or Public) exploitation endeavor. Fundamentally, it is an indispensable tool for modern data access, management, and integration.

Here’s a post that provides further insight into the ultra-powerful Virtuoso SPARQL Query Engine that’s also accessible to existing ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, or OLE-DB compliant apps and services.
The Magic of Being You! is that “You” know yourself better than anyone else ever would. Unfortunately, Web application and service developers continue to grapple with this fundamental reality en route to making us all much more vulnerable than imaginable. This post demonstrates that we can actually take control of our own identity .
Maintenance Release of Virtuoso 8.3.3319 (Enterprise Edition)

This Maintenance Release brings a new feature (SHACL support), OpenID Connect and OAuth protocol enhancements, bug fixes, and a few interface tweaks to aid better understanding of existing functionality. See the maintenance release notes for additional information.

Here’s a Live SHACL demo using data from http://datashapes.org.

Knowledge Graph Exploitation, for Publishers -

Why? Every publisher oversees a database that ultimately drives their business. Generally, across all media, these databases are of high quality due to editorial best-practices acquired over many years.
New Cloud Editions of Virtuoso 8.3.3319 are now available from both the Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS Clouds. In either case, you have a following benefits:
- Choice of Pay-As-You-Go (PAGO) and Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) instance options;
- PAGO instances offering unlimited connections (users) and CPU Affinity pegged to your Instance Type Choice
- A modern multi-model DBMS and Data Virtualization Platform that supports declarative operations (using SQL and/or SPARQL) on data modeled as Tables or Entity Relationship Graphs.
Here are detailed usage guides for both the Pay-As-You-Go (PAGO) and Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) Editions of Virtuoso for Azure - Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform:
1. Azure OpenLink Virtuoso Ubuntu PAGO VM – available for a FREE 30 Day Evaluation
2. Azure OpenLink Virtuoso Ubuntu BYOL VM

New OpenLink ODBC-JDBC Lite Bridge Driver (a/k/a Connector)

The latest release of our JDBC-to-ODBC and ODBC-to-JDBC Bridge Drivers (a/k/a Connectors) includes support for Java 15+ and improved support for Java 8+. As usual, FREE Evaluations are available for download from here.
Making an ODBC Connection to Neo4j from Excel (macOS)

We offer a high-performance and secure ODBC-JDBC Bridge that addresses the challenge arising from an increasing number of ODBC-compliant Applications requiring access to Databases that are only JDBC-accessible.
Querying Neo4j from Microsoft Excel for macOS — using Cypher via ODBC — A detailed post about accessing data in a Neo4j Graph Database (using Cypher) from Microsoft Excel, courtesy of our high-performance and sophisticated ODBC-to-JDBC Bridge Drivers (or Connectors).

The Virtuoso Sponger (or simply, “the Sponger”) module remains one of the most powerful aspects of our Virtuoso platform, with regards to Knowledge Graph generation and management.

Here is a presentation that demonstrates how the Sponger can be used to progressively create and enhance Knowledge Graphs, with live demo links.
A quick demonstration of combining SPARQL, SQL, and Cypher by —
- Using a Federated SPARQL (SPARQL-FED) query from OpenLink Virtuoso to mesh data about a specific entity that exists in the DBpedia and Wikidata knowledge graphs
- Using a SPARQL-within-SQL (SPASQL) query to return tabular relations in Neo4j, via JDBC
- Forward Chaining RDF triples to a property graph using Cypher, and visualizing the results