rdf-dereference

RDF Dereference

This library dereferences URLs to get its RDF contents.

This tool is useful in situations where you have a URL, and you just need the parsed triples/quads, without having to concern yourself with determining the correct content type and picking the correct parser.

RDF contents are returned as an RDF stream with RDFJS-compliant quads. This library takes care of all the necessary boilerplate automatically, such as content negotiation for getting appropriate RDF serialization, decompression, following redirects, setting base URLs, and so on. If the server did not emit any content type, then the content type will be guessed based on well-known extensions.

The following RDF serializations are supported:

Name	Content type	Extensions
TriG	application/trig	.trig
N-Quads	application/n-quads	.nq, .nquads
Turtle	text/turtle	.ttl, .turtle
N-Triples	application/n-triples	.nt, .ntriples
Notation3	text/n3	.n3
JSON-LD	application/ld+json, application/json	.json, .jsonld
RDF/XML	application/rdf+xml	.rdf, .rdfxml, .owl
RDFa and script RDF data tags HTML/XHTML	text/html, application/xhtml+xml	.html, .htm, .xhtml, .xht
RDFa in SVG/XML	image/svg+xml,application/xml	.xml, .svg, .svgz

Internally, this library makes use of RDF parsers from the Comunica framework, which enable streaming processing of RDF.

If you need something more low-level with more control, have a look at rdf-parse.

Installation

$ npm install rdf-dereference

or

$ yarn add rdf-dereference

This package also works out-of-the-box in browsers via tools such as webpack and browserify.

Require

import rdfDereferencer from "rdf-dereference";

or

const rdfDereferencer = require("rdf-dereference").default;

Usage

Dereferencing an RDF document

The rdfDereferencer.dereference method accepts an URL, and outputs a promise resolving to an object containing a quad stream.

const { quads } = await rdfDereferencer.dereference('http://dbpedia.org/page/12_Monkeys');
quads.on('data', (quad) => console.log(quad))
     .on('error', (error) => console.error(error))
     .on('end', () => console.log('All done!'));

Such a stream is useful when the RDF document is huge, and you want to process it in a memory-efficient way.

Dereferencing works with any kind of RDF serialization, even HTML documents containing RDFa and JSON-LD:

const { quads1 } = await rdfDereferencer.dereference('https://www.rubensworks.net/');
const { quads2 } = await rdfDereferencer.dereference('https://www.netflix.com/title/80180182');

Importing the resulting quads into store

These resulting quads can easily be stored in a more convenient datastructure using tools such as rdf-store-stream:

import {storeStream} from "rdf-store-stream";

const store = await storeStream(quads);

const resultStream = store.match(namedNode('http://example.org/subject'));

Advanced features

Determining the final URL

If dereferencing went through various redirects, it may be useful to determine the final URL. This can be done using the url field of the output object:

const { quads, url } = await rdfDereferencer.dereference('https://www.netflix.com/title/80180182');
console.log(url); // The final URL, e.g. https://www.netflix.com/at-en/title/80180182

Triples or Quads

Some RDF serializations don't support named graphs, such as Turtle and N-Triples. In some cases, it may be valuable to know whether or not an RDF document was serialized with such a format. If this was the case, the triples flag will be set to true on the resulting object:

const { quads, triples } = await rdfDereferencer.dereference('https://ruben.verborgh.org/profile/');
console.log(triples); // If the document only supported triples, true in this case, since it returned Turtle.

License

This software is written by Ruben Taelman.

This code is released under the MIT license.

Changelog

[v1.0.0] - 2019-09-29

Initial release