ActiveTriple: a tool to search a triple store

Before you can use ActiveTriple, you must set up a connector and associate it with ActiveTriple.

ActiveTriple.set_connector(MyConnector)

Two connector templates are provided:

A very basic connector, that shows the minimum requirement for a connector.

This connector provides a connection to a server via HTTP post. If you have a server that will return json data to a posted request, you can inherit from this class to make a simple connector. For example:

class MyConnector < ActiveTriple::Connectors::PostToUrlConnector
  def path
    @path = 'http://path/to/the/server'
  end
end

ActiveTriple.set_connector MyConnector

ActiveTriple uses TripleParser, and therefore you should also configure TripleParser so that it works for your environment:

TripleParser::Settings.application_domain = 'your.domain.com'

To search for items:

near a given location:

ActiveTriple.location('London')

within 30km of a location

ActiveTriple.location('London', '30km')

about a resource

ActiveTriple.about('London')

mentions a resource

ActiveTriple.mentions('London')

with a title of "This article"

ActiveTriple.title('This article')

The title query can also be made using a where clause, with the key matching the predicate, and the value matching the object. The where method accepts both colon delimited style triples and bracketed url style triples

ActiveTriple.where('dc:terms:title' => 'text:en:"This article"')

or

ActiveTriple.where('<http://purl.org/dc/terms/title>' => '"This article"@en')

ActiveTriple.location('Evesham', '200km').mentions('London')

By default, queries are limited to return ten items. This can be overwritten.

ActiveTriple.location('London').limit(2)
ActiveTriple.limit(20).location('London')

Each of the above searches will return an ActiveTriple instance. To access the data returned by the query, either use 'all' or use an Array method.

Get all the items:

ActiveTriple.location('London').all

Get the title of each of the items:

ActiveTriple.location('London').collect{|a| a.title}

Notice in the last example, that the item is an object with a method title. Hashie is used to convert the data from it's native hash to an object. The native hash is nested and this is reflected in the structure of the object.

To return the body text of the first item:

ActiveTriple.location('London').first.full_data.body

To return the original hash:

ActiveTriple.location('London').first.to_hash

If the query returns no items, an empty array will be returned when an attempt is made to access the data.

ActiveTriple.mentions('XXXXYYYY').all  ---> []