flint

The fire i' the flint shows not till it be struck - William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act I, Scene 1

A Clojure(Script) DSL for creating SPARQL query and update strings.

Installation

Add the following to your deps.edn map.

com.yetanalytics/flint {:mvn/version "0.2.0"
                        :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure
                                     org.clojure/clojurescript]}

See Clojars for installation using Leiningen, Boot, etc; do not forget to adapt :exclusions to your method.

Outline

Documentation is also available on cljdoc.

• Queries and Updates
  • Queries
  • Updates
• Clauses and Subforms
  • Graph IRIs
  • Graph Patterns
  • Modifiers
  • Prologue
• Expressions
• Triples
• RDF Terms

API

Three functions exist in the Flint API:

• format-query
• format-update
• format-updates

The first two functions format a single SPARQL query or update, respectively, while the third formats a collection of SPARQL updates into a single update string.

Each function takes in the following keyword arguments:

Argument	Description
:pretty?	If true, adds line breaks and indentation to the resulting SPARQL string. Default false.
:validate?	If true, validates that prefixed IRIs are expandable and that certain restrictions on variables and blank nodes are met. Default true.
:spec-ed?	If true, let the exception data map be the spec error data map (i.e. with ::s/problems) upon conformance failure, instead of Flint's default error map. Spec error data maps can get quite large, hence this is default false.
:force-iris?	If true, let all literals be formatted with their datatype IRIs (e.g. <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string> for string literals); if false (the default), then string, numeric, and boolean literals will not have such IRIs appended. Language-tagged literals will never have an appended datatype IRI.

Examples

The following is a simple query that queries the name of the author who wrote the popular manga series Attack on Titan:

(def query
  '{:prefixes {:dc "<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>"}
    :select   [?author]
    :where    [[?aot :dc/title "Attack on Titan"]
               [?aot :dc/creator ?author]]})

Note that the map needs to be quoted due to the presence of symbols in the map. We can then pass the query to the function format-query:

(require '[com.yetanalytics.flint :as f])

(f/format-query query :pretty? true)

and it will return a SPARQL string:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
SELECT ?author
WHERE {
    ?aot dc:title "Attack on Titan" .
    ?aot dc:creator ?author .
}

One can then pass this query string to a Resource Description Framework (RDF) database and, depending on the data in the system, should return that ?author is Hajime Isayama.

The following is a more comprehensive example - a query that looks for the publisher of Attack on Titan, then returns the titles of all the works it published in 2010 or after:

(def query-2
  '{:prefixes {:dc  "<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>"
               :xsd "<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>"}
    :select   [?title]
    :from     ["<http://my-anime-rdf-graph.com>"]
    :where    [[:union [{_b1 {:dc/title     #{{:en "Attack on Titan"}}
                              :dc/publisher #{?publisher}}}]
                       [{_b2 {:dc/title     #{{:jp "進撃の巨人"}}
                              :dc/publisher #{?publisher}}}]]
               {?work {:dc/publisher #{?publisher}
                       :dc/title     #{?title}
                       :dc/date      #{?date}}}
               [:filter (<= #inst "2010-01-01T00:00:00Z" ?date)]]})

which demonstrates several additional features, such as an alternate triple syntax using maps instead of vectors, blank nodes, language tags, and the :union, :filter and :from clauses. When passed to format-query, it is translated to:

PREFIX dc:  <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>
SELECT ?title
FROM <http://my-anime-rdf-graph.com>
WHERE {
    {
        _:b1 dc:title "Attack on Titan"@en ;
             dc:publisher ?publisher .
    }
    UNION
    {
        _:b2 dc:title "進撃の巨人"@jp ;
             dc:publisher ?publisher .
    }
    ?work dc:publisher ?publisher ;
          dc:title ?title ;
          dc:date ?date .
    FILTER ("2010-01-01T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime <= ?date)
}

Prior Art

• Flint is based off of the grammar of SPARQL 1.1.
• The idea of a SPARQL DSL was inspired by HoneySQL, a DSL for creating SQL queries.
• Matsu is a previous SPARQL DSL implementation that uses an expression-based approach to query construction.
• Flint borrows certain syntactic conventions from the Datomic and Asami query and update languages.
• The map-based triples syntax is based on the normal form used in the IGraph protocol.

License

Copyright © 2022 Yet Analytics, Inc.

Distributed under the Apache License version 2.0.