Question

The following code queries DBpedia for places within a bounded geographic area and returns the name, lat, and long of the place. I’d also like the query to return the category of the place–e.g., park, restaurant, museum, etc.

The following code works fine.

        sparql = SPARQLWrapper("http://dbpedia.org/sparql")
        sparql.setQuery("""
        PREFIX geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
        PREFIX dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/>
        PREFIX category: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:>
        SELECT * WHERE {
        ?s a dbo:Place .
        ?s geo:lat ?lat .
        ?s geo:long ?long .

I tried to add the following code to get categories for places, but this doesn’t work:

        ?s category:cat ?cat .

What should I add/change? Thanks.

Answer 1

You can get the category of a place (assuming you mean the type) by finding the type (rdfs:type) or the subject (dcterms:subject) of a resource. In DBPedia the first relates to the DBPedia and Yago ontologies and the second is a SKOS hierarchy in DBPedia. Here is an example query:

 PREFIX geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
 PREFIX dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/>
 PREFIX dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
        SELECT * WHERE {
        ?s a dbo:Place .
        ?s geo:lat ?lat .
        ?s geo:long ?long .
        ?s a ?type . 
        ?s dcterms:subject ?sub
} 

Note that you will get multiple types and subjects for each place.