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BASIL is designed as middleware system that mediates between SPARQL end- points and applications.

Overview

Data providers focus on maintenance and evolution of their SPARQL endpoints and data provided. Data consumers use tailored Web APIs as mean to access data. BASIL introduces Web API tailors as a new actor of the process of publishing and consuming data. Tailors model Web APIs for data consumers through API specifications. An API specification defines: a data source, and the portion of data to be returned by the API, and the input parameters. A SPARQL query is the formalisms used to specify input parameters and output data of a single API. Queries are stored in the BASIL middleware. Each time an API is consumed, its query is executed on the related endpoint, then the query result is returned. In addition, tailors can specify views for each Web API. A view is an alternative presentation of an API results based on a template or script1. In a concrete scenario, the Web API tailor can be a member of the data provider organisation that builds APIs for data consumers, which are not SPARQL experienced, or a data consumer who has SPARQL knowledge and prefers to benefit of the advantages of Web APIs.

Public endpoint

Basil is online as a public service at http://basil.kmi.open.ac.uk.

Useful information:

• SPARQL variable naming convention for WEB API parameters mapping
• Use scripts for post-processing of the result set
  • documentation is coming soon, in the meantime see: https://github.com/the-open-university/basil/issues/34