DBpedia SPARQL Query US Universities

Question

I created a SPARQL query that I'm running on the DBpedia SNORQL SPARQL endpoint. The purpose of the query is to get a list of universities or colleges in the United States, including their longitude, latitude, and endowment. The query seems to be working but seems to be missing some records and/or attributes. So, for example, Harvard University doesn't show up in the result, even though its DBpedia record exists and the attributes should match my query. I'm not sure why that record doesn't show up. Another example is University of Massachusetts Boston, which comes up as a query result, but the result doesn't get the longitude and latitude attributes, even though the record contains those attributes. Here's the SPARQL Query:

PREFIX geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
PREFIX d: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/>

SELECT ?uni ?link ?lat ?long ?endowment
WHERE {
?s foaf:homepage ?link ;
   rdf:type <http://schema.org/CollegeOrUniversity> ;
rdfs:label ?uni
OPTIONAL {?s geo:lat ?lat ;
             geo:long ?long . 
          ?s d:endowment ?endowment . }
FILTER (LANGMATCHES(LANG(?uni), 'en'))

{?s dbpedia2:country "U.S."@en . }
UNION
{?s dbpedia2:country "U.S." . }
UNION
{?s d:country :United_States . }

}
ORDER BY ?s

Joshua Taylor Joshua Taylor · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-12T03:47:05

The query you posted will only select entities with a foaf:homepage and Harvard University does not have one. (That is, the resource does not have a foaf:homepage property. Obviously the university does have a homepage.) UMass Boston doesn't match the optional pattern --

OPTIONAL {?s geo:lat ?lat ;
             geo:long ?long . 
          ?s d:endowment ?endowment . }

-- because that pattern only matches when ?s has a geo:lat, a geo:long, and a d:endowment. Though the pattern is optional, the whole pattern must either match or not; you do not get partial matches.

Here's your query, reworked to use the built-in namespaces that the DBPedia SPARQL endpoint currently supports (that list is subject to change over time), with the OPTIONAL parts broken down as necessary, and moved to the end. (Moving them to the end is just an aesthetic consideration.) I tried some various constraints, and it is interesting to note that only 32 universities have the dbpprop:country "U.S."@en, but 273 have dbpprop:country "United States"@en. There are 7620 results in total.

PREFIX dbpedia-owl: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/>
PREFIX dbpedia: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/>
PREFIX dbpprop: <http://dbpedia.org/property/>

SELECT ?label ?homepage ?lat ?long ?endowment
WHERE {
  ?school a <http://schema.org/CollegeOrUniversity> 
  { ?school dbpedia-owl:country dbpedia:United_States }
  UNION
  { ?school dbpprop:country dbpedia:United_States }
  UNION 
  { ?school dbpprop:country "U.S."@en }
  UNION 
  { ?school dbpprop:country "United States"@en }

  OPTIONAL { ?school rdfs:label ?label .
             FILTER (LANGMATCHES(LANG(?label), 'en')) }
  OPTIONAL { ?school foaf:homepage ?homepage }
  OPTIONAL { ?school geo:lat ?lat ; geo:long ?long }
  OPTIONAL { ?school dbpedia-owl:endowment ?endowment }
}

SPARQL Results

DBpedia SPARQL Query US Universities

2 Answers