About 6 months ago I reported about my efforts to RDF-ize the data from the\nNMRShiftDB. Since then, time was consumed by many other things, but now that Bioclipse can query\nSPARQL end points, that I want to contribute the triple set (it is GNU FDL-licensed)\nto Bio2RDF, that a student started working in my group (now larger than just me :) on reasoning on life sciences data, and that I\nrecently contributed my 1000th NMR spectrum to the database, I thought it was time to\nfinally reinstall Virtuoso.
\n\nThere are precompiled binaries for Ubuntu and Debian,\nbut Michel encouraged me to use version 6 when he visited us .\nAnd so I compiled and install 6.0.0.TP1 on the public server, while I do have the\nbinary debs for 5.0.12 on my laptop. With some basic Apache magic, I hooked up the SPARQL end point of the server to the web:
\n\n<Proxy /nmrshiftdb/sparql>\n RewriteEngine On\n Allow from all\n ProxyPass http://localhost:8890/sparql\n ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8890/sparql\n</Proxy>\nNice thing about this is, that I can set up multiple servers, allowing me to keep incompatibly licensed data sets apart (see\nOpen Data: license, rights, aggregation, clean interfaces? ), which is\nthe same approach Bio2RDF is taking.
\n\nThe end point now offers about 278887\ntriples, but this will soon rise as I make more content from the database available in the original SQL database. The data is from the\n1.3.3 release by Chris’\nteam, and does not include my 1000th spectrum.
\n\nGetting the data into the database was not trivial either. The documentation suggests WebDAV, and that indeed worked for me once, after\nusing the curl approach suggested here. But upon a second upload, it\ndid again not enter the store. The ultimate solution was to use the iSQL interface, with the following SQL
\n\nDB.DBA.RDF_LOAD_RDFXML_MT(\n file_to_string_output('/tmp/nmrshiftdb.rdf'), '',\n 'http://pele.farmbio.uu.se/nmrshiftdb'\n);\nScientifically, this progress is not overly interesting, although it makes it very clear that you really should not have to be happy with proprietary\nand non-semantic formats for anything. But, to me, this is mostly a technological success of great importance: I can now share really large sets of\nRDF data.
\n\nQuerying this data is a simple with SPARQL, and the results are available in various formats, such as JSON, which makes it easy to integrate in\nthird-party applications or Google Wave robots \n(did I hear someone say NMRShifty?). As I have blogged before,\nSPARQL is an excellent tool to aggregate scientific data prior to data analysis. And I will demo more interesting queries later this month.
", "summary": "About 6 months ago I reported about my efforts to RDF-ize the data from the NMRShiftDB. Since then, time was consumed by many other things, but now that Bioclipse can query SPARQL end points, that I want to contribute the triple set (it is GNU FDL-licensed) to Bio2RDF, that a student started working in my group (now larger than just me :) on reasoning on life sciences data, and that I recently contributed my 1000th NMR spectrum to the database, I thought it was time to finally reinstall Virtuoso.", "date_published": "2009-09-04T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-27T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["rdf","sparql","nmrshiftdb","cheminf"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }