I'm currently working my way down SPARQL as a means to query large datasets. I've been playing around with the SPARQL Views plugin made by Lin Clark (http://drupal.org/project/sparql_views). The plugin allows you to i.e. query dbpedia.org, retrieve the results and process/display them through the Views API. But you can take it a lot further then that if the data you want to query is RDF formatted.

Wouldn't it be great if the SIMILE Timeline module was able to read from a SPARQL query resultset and display them as a timeline? The library itself already understands SPARQL, but can it also be done within the Views framework?

I understand the Timeline works only with nodes and CCK Date fields. Would it take a lot of effort to add support for other data types?

One can only dream of the possibilities... :)

Comments

xamanu’s picture

xamanu commented
Version: master » 6.x-3.x-dev

Thank your for this suggestion. This really would be a dream! I think it should be pretty easy to get a basic support but it make things some more complicated (thinking about scalability etc). But, hey, let's try it.

There is a new 3.x dev snapshot of the timeline module available that enables other modules to implement plugins (based on ctools) for broader data support #602956: Implement supported fields as plugins. You might want to have a look on this to see how to get support for other data types into the module. I suggest to create a timeline_sparql submodule.