Preparations

Suitable Text Editor

You should have a text editor set up which offers syntax-highlighting for Turtle (an RDF serialisation format) and (optionally) for SPARQL queries.

Several more powerful editor (e.g. Emacs, Vim, Notepad++) either support support for these syntaxes out of the box or there are appropriate community extensions. Thus, if you are experienced in their usage, setting up your favorite of these editors for Turtle and SPARQL might be your best option.

For all users with no prior experience with the aforementioned editors, we recommend installing and setting up Atom for this session. Installers for the recent version for all common platform are available at GitHub. After installation of Atom, you can install the packages language-rdf and language-sparql directly from within the Editor itself, using the Settings. If you prefer the command line way, just type: apm install language-rdf and apm install language-sparql

Java 8 JRE

Most tools that will be used in the session require the Java Runtime Environment (or Java Development Kit) Version 8. For recent Linux distributions, a Java 8 JRE should be available in the official repositories. If you are on Windows or Mac and do not have Java 8 set up already, please obtain it from Oracle.

Please also ensure that the directory with the Java executables has been added to your $PATH. To verify that $PATH is set correctly, enter java -version into a command line prompt. The output should contain version "1.8.0 as a substring.

Notes on Command Prompt Usage (only relevant on Windows)

We will use the command prompt regularly in this session. For the sake of simplicity, the rest of the documentation will give the command examples generally with the command names for BASH, the default command prompt on (almost) all Linux versions.

Current versions of Windows mostly ship with the PowerShell, which has aliases for all the common BASH commands occurring in this tutorial to their Windows counterparts, thus, the commands should be executable in a PowerShell session without alterations. If you use the traditional Windows Command Prompt, some command names and or options will have to be adjusted by you (e.g. dir instead of ls). Alternatively, Babun can be used.