Our work to improve the experience of accessing semantic data through SPARQL has recently taken another step forwards with a major upgrade to Flint – our web-based open source SPARQL editor.
Since we released Flint version 0.5 back in June 2011, the most requested feature was support for SPARQL1.1. Flint version 1.0 now includes support for the current SPARQL 1.1 specification, making it a good choice for accessing triplestores, whether they use the 1.0 or 1.1 version of the SPARQL specification.
Flint’s context-sensitive help provides great support to deal with the increased sophistication of SPARQL1.1 syntax. If you’ve got an update endpoint allowing requests to insert and delete triples, Flint 1.0 can now help there too, with a new separate mode for SPARQL1.1 update syntax.
Going beyond many existing web-based SPARQL query building tools, which lack abilities such as context-dependent autocomplete or syntax checking, Flint encompasses many of the features developers would expect of traditional Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and code parsers, through its web implementation.
As in previous versions, Flint 1.0 uses both the syntactic context (what’s expected at the cursor position) as well as what’s in the actual dataset, to provide relevant help. In addition to autocomplete on properties, the new version also provides autocomplete where a class is expected.
