Overview

An increasing number of biological databases have been made available in the form of Resource Description Framework (RDF) and accessible through SPARQL endpoints, forming together a worldwide platform of biological data integration across the web. However, writing SPARQL codes for querying the databases often becomes a burden for biologists; thus, an easy-to-use querying interface is necessary.

Here, we developed a command-line SPARQL client, SPANG. SPANG can dynamically generate typical SPARQL queries depending on command-line options and arguments. SPANG supports interprocess communication to pass the variable bindings between queries, enabling execution of combination of queries and integration of data across the multiple SPARQL endpoints. SPANG can also search local RDF files besides remote data stores. These features provide the users an easy ways to integrate distributed data described in RDF, thus enhances the integrative analysis of biological data on the Semantic Web platform.