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sparqling international calling codes
The other day I was looking for a list of international calling codes. Since most of them are listed in Wikipedia, it occurred to me it would be easy to get all that information in a nice easy to use format by querying DBPedia with SPARQL. So I wrote a very light weight SPARQL client (source code available here). Download the jar and you can then run the following query:
hjs@bblfish:0$ java -jar Sparql.jar > results.n3
PREFIX dbp: <http://dbpedia.org/property/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
CONSTRUCT { ?cntry dbp:callingCode ?code ;
rdfs:label ?name .
} WHERE {
?cntry dbp:callingCode ?code .
OPTIONAL { ?cntry rdfs:label ?name . }
}
^d
That is after typing the command line java -jar Sparrql.jar > results.n3 I pasted the SPARQL query (in blue above) and ended the input with control-d, which on unix is the end-of-file character.
This sent the query to DBPedia, and returned a long list of answers which were place in results.n3 of which the first set is
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Abu_Dhabi_%28emirate%29> <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#label> "\u963F\u5E03\u624E\u6BD4\u914B\u957F\u56FD\""@zh , "Abu Dhabi (emirate)"@en , "Abu Dhabi (emirato)"@it , "\u0410\u0431\u0443-\u0414\u0430\u0431\u0438 (\u044D\u043C\u0438\u0440\u0430\u0442)\""@ru ; <http://dbpedia.org/property/callingCode> "971-2"@en .
In the above case the calling code should proabaly not be tagged with an @en. So the data still needs to be cleaned up a little at present. It would be nice to be able to quickly fix the data when one notices something like this. Most of the other results are in xsd:integer format, which I think is also not quite right. The literal string is a better representation of a calling code I think.
Anyway the data is easy to clean up. And we have an example of a very simple but useful query.
Posted at 10:20PM Feb 28, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Java | Comments[2]
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Stimulated by this item and since I'm currently exploring the application of XQuery for these tasks, I wrote up the results in the XQuery Wikibook I'm writing - in fact I ended up scaping Wikipedia as the most accurate listing.
Posted by Chris Wallace on March 01, 2008 at 12:20 PM CET #
A very nice flash viewer can be found here:
http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/website/flex/dbPedia/sparqlQueryViewer/
Henry
Posted by Henry Story on March 26, 2008 at 04:21 PM CET #