Yesterday TopQuadrant announced the delivery of the first visual scripting language for the semantic web, promising in their press release that “for the first time, end users can integrate data sources, run queries on the combined data, and create information mash-ups and reports on an as-needed basis – all without assistance from the IT department.” Of course we all love the IT crowd – but we don’t mind gaining a little more autonomy either, do we;-) SPARQLMotion is fully compliant with and utilizes the W3C standard SPARQL.

TopQuadrant’s Holger Knublauch first posted about this in November 2007:

SparqlMotion is a new visual language that enables average users to define scripts to import, post-process, query and visualize data using semantic web technology. Users can define and share those scripts as OWL models, based on a dedicated SparqlMotion ontology, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit ... and module library. The graph editor of Composer’s Maestro Edition (or any other OWL editor) can be used to define the data and execution flow of these scripts using drag and drop:

There’s a video tutorial on his blog for those who want to see SPARQLmotion in action.