1

I have defined a rdf class for Books. Another rdf class for describing people. The Book class contains authoredBy field which links book instances to people instances.

Properties of Book

Book -Id -name -authoredBy

Person -id -firstName -LastName -designation

For retrieving book properties, i use the following sparql query

DESCRIBE ?book WHERE { ?book a rdf:Book ;

}

I am able to retrieve all the properties belonging to Book using DESCRIBE i.e the predicate , subject and object. However when it comes to authoredBy field, the above query returns me only URI of the author.

I would like to see all predicates that belong to author as well (i.e its firstname, lastname). Can the above DESCRIBE query be modified to achieve this ?

Anubhav
  • 87
  • 3

1 Answers1

4

all the properties belonging to Book using DESCRIBE

Properties don't "belong" to things. OWL isn't an object-oriented programming language.

However, you can certainly get the properties and values of books and their authors. The particular results of a describe query are implementation dependent. Even though the implementation that you're using gives you certain results, there's no guarantee that other implementations would give you that. It's safer to use a construct query. In your case, it sounds like you want 

construct where { 
  ?book a ex:Book ;
        ?p ?o ;
        ex:authoredBy* ?author .
  ?author ?ap ?ao .
}

That will return a graph of all the triples about all books and their authors.

i use the following sparql query

DESCRIBE ?book WHERE { ?book a rdf:Book ;

}

Note that you really shouldn't be defining your own terms in the RDF namespace (e.g., as you have with rdf:Book). You should use some other namespace for your own classes.

Joshua Taylor
  • 84,998
  • 9
  • 154
  • 353