Twinkle: A SPARQL Query Tool

Twinkle is a simple GUI interface that wraps the ARQ SPARQL query engine. The tool should be useful both for people wanting to learn the SPARQL query language, as well as those doing Semantic Web development.

Twinkle was originally inspired by Elliotte Harold's XQuisitor which provides a simple GUI interface for playing with XQuery.

• Load, edit and save SPARQL queries
• Insert PREFIX statements into queries
• Configure custom namespaces so they can be quickly inserted into queries
• Cancel long running queries
• Save results to file
• Query local files and remote RDF documents
• Query RDF data held in relational databases
• Query online SPARQL endpoints, such as DBpedia, reyvu.com and GovTrack.
• Query using standard SPARQL, or the ARQ extended syntax which supports COUNT, etc.
• Use ARQ extension functions and property functions
• Apply inferencing (e.g. Jena rules, RDF Schema, OWL ontology) when running queries
• Configure commonly used data sources for quick access

View some annotated screen shots on Flickr

To configure new data sources and prefixes, see etc/config.n3 in the distribution.

There are some sample SPARQL queries included in the distributon in the examples directory. There should be some for each of the pre-configured sources.

• Twinkle 2.0 (source)
• Twinkle 2.0 (binary)

You'll need to have Java 1.5 or higher installed to use Twinkle. Download the distribution and unzip it into a new directory. Open a command-prompt and execute the following:

  
  java -jar twinkle.jar
  
  

Twinkle is distributed under the Gnu Public Licence.

Photo courtesy of Glen Bowman