Converting any SPARQL endpoint to an OpenAPI

Logo of the grlc project.

Sometimes you run into something awesome. I had that one or two months ago, when I found out about a cool project that can convert a random SPARQL endpoint into an OpenAPI endpoint: grlc. Now, May/June was really busy (well, the least few weeks before summer not much less so), but at the WikiProject Wikidata for research meeting in Berlin last month, I just had to give it a go.

There is a convenient Docker image, so setting it up was a breeze (see their GitHub repo):

git clone https://github.com/CLARIAH/grlc
cd grlc
docker pull clariah/grlc
docker-compose -f docker-compose.default.yml up

What the software does, is take a number of configuration files that define what the OpenAPI REST call should look, and what the underlying SPARQL is. For example, to get all projects in Wikidata with a CORDIS project identifier, we have this configration file:

#+ summary: Lists grants with a CORDIS identifier
#+ endpoint_in_url: False
#+ endpoint: http://query.wikidata.org/sparql
#+ tags:
#+   - Grants

PREFIX bd: <http://www.bigdata.com/rdf#>
PREFIX wikibase: <http://wikiba.se/ontology#>
PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>

SELECT ?grant ?grantLabel ?cordis WHERE {
  ?grant wdt:P3400 ?cordis .
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en".
  }
}

The full set of configuration files I hacked up (including one with a parameter) can be found here. The OpenAPI then looks something like this:

I haven't played enough with it yet, and I hope we can later use this in OpenRiskNet.