Client-side Processing of GeoSPARQL Functions with Triple Pattern Fragments

“Place” is an important concept providing a useful dimension to explore, align and analyze data on the Linked Data Web. Œough Linked Data datasets can use standardized geospatial predicates such as GeoSPARQL, access to SPARQL endpoints that supports these is not guaranteed. When not available, one needs to load the data into their own GeoSPARQL-enabled triplestores in order to avail of those predicates. Triple PaŠern Fragments (TPF) is a proposal to make clients more intelligent in processing RDF, thereby lessening the burden carried by servers. In this paper, we propose to extend TPF to support GeoSPARQL. Œe contribution is a minimal extension of the TPF client that does not rely on a spatial database such that the extension can be run from within a browser. Even though our approach will unlikely outperform GeoSPARQL-enabled triplestores in terms of query execution time, we demonstrate its feasibility by means of a couple of use cases using data provided by data.geohive.ie, an initiative to publish authoritative, highresolution geospatial data for Œe Republic of Ireland as Linked Data on the Web. Œis high-resolution data does cause a lot of network trac, but related work showed how extending the communication between a TPF client and server reduces the number HTTP calls and some network trac. Œe integration of our extension in one such optimization did reduce the overhead. We, however, decided to stick to our €rst implementation as it only extended the client in a minimal way. Future work includes investigating how our approach scales, and its usefulness of adding and using a spatial component to datasets.