Extensions in ARQ

There are several ways to extend the ARQ query engine within the SPARQL syntax. ARQ also has syntactic extensions for GROUP BY, nested SELECTs and assignment; these are described elsewhere.

Functions are standard part of SPARQL. ARQ provides application-written functions and provides a function library. Applications can write and register their own functions.

Property functions provide a way to provide custom matching of particular predicates. They enable triple matches to be calculated, rather than just looked up in a RDF graph and they are a way to add functionality and remain within SPARQL. ARQ has a property function library. Applications can write and register their own property functions.

The free text support in ARQ is provided by Lucene, using property functions.

Filter Functions

A SPARQL custom function is implementation dependent. Most details of the ARQ query engine do not have to be understood to write a function; it is a matter of implementing one interface.  This is made simpler for many cases by a number of base classes that provide much of the machinery needed.

Function Registry

Functions can be installed into the function registry by the application. The function registry is a mapping from URI to a factory class for functions (each time a function is mentioned in a query, a new instance is created) and there is an auto-factory class so just registering a Java class will work. A function can access the queried dataset.

Dynamically Loaded Functions

The ARQ function library uses this mechanism.  The namespace of the ARQ function library is <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/function#>.

PREFIX afn: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/function#>
PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
SELECT ?v
{ ?x dc:date ?date .
 FILTER (?date < afn:now() )
}

The afn:now returns the time the query started.

The filter functions in the ARQ distribution are described on the filter function library page.

URIs for functions in the (fake) URI scheme java: are dynamically loaded. The class name forms the scheme specific part of the URI.

Property functions

Property functions, sometimes called "magic properties", are properties that cause triple matching to happen by executing some piece of code, determined by the property URI, and not by the usual graph matching. They can be used to give certain kinds of inference and rule processing. Some calculated properties have additional, non-declarative requirements such as needing one of other of the subject or object to be a query constant or a bound value, and not able to generate all possibilities for that slot.

Property functions must have fixed URI for the predicate (it can't be query variable). They may take a list for subject or object.

One common case is for access to collections (RDF lists) or containers (rdf:Bag, rdf:Seq, rdf:Alt).

PREFIX list: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/list#>

SELECT ?member
{ ?x :p ?list .		# Some way to find the list
 ?list list:member ?member .
}

which can also be written:

PREFIX list: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/list#>

SELECT ?member
{ ?x :p [ list:member ?member ] }

Likewise, RDF containers:

PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

SELECT ?member
{ ?x :p ?bag .		# Some way to find the bag
 ?bag rdfs:member ?member .
}

Property functions can also take lists in the subject or object slot.

Code for properties can be dynamically loaded or pre-registered. For example, splitIRI will take an IRI and assign the namespace ad localname parts to variables (if the variables are already bound, not constants are used, splitIRI will check the values).

PREFIX xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>
PREFIX apf: <java:com.hp.hpl.jena.query.pfunction.library.>

SELECT ?namespace ?localname
{ xsd:string apf:splitIRI (?namespace ?localname) }

Property functions might conflict with inference rules and it can be turned off by the Java code:

 ARQ.setFalse(ARQ.enablePropertyFunctions) ;

or on a per instance basis:

 QueryExecution qExec = . . . ;
 qExec.getContext().setFalse(ARQ.enablePropertyFunctions) ;

The property functions in the ARQ distribution are described on the property function library page.

URIs for functions in the (fake) URI scheme java: are dynamically loaded. The class name forms the scheme specific part of the URI.

DESCRIBE handlers

The DESCRIBE result form in SPARQL does not define an exact form of RDF to return. Instead, it allows the server or query processor to return what it considers to be an appropriate description of the resources located. This description will be specific to the domain, data modelling or application.

ARQ comes with one built-in handler which calculates the blank node closure of resources found. While suitable for many situations, it is not general (for example, a FOAF file usually consists of all blank nodes). ARQ allows the application to replace or add handlers for producing DESCRIBE result forms.

Application-specific handlers can be added to the DescribeHandlerRegistry. The handler will be called for each resource (not literals) identified by the DESCRIBE query.

Blank Node Labels

URIs from with scheme name "_" (which is illegal) are created as blank node labels for directly accessing a blank node in the queried graph or dataset. This are constant terms in the query - not unnamed variables. Do not confuse these with the standard qname-like notation for blank nodes in queries. This is not portable - use with care.

<_:1234-5678-90> # A blank node in the data
_:b0 # A blank node in the query - a variable

ARQ Documentation Page