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Purpose

Permits external applications to add or remove specific triples from the VIVO data model. These changes use the standard data channels in VIVO, so the search index will be updated as appropriate, and the reasoner will add or remove inferences as needed.

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The API supports only HTTP POST calls. GET, HEAD, and other methods are not supported, and will return a response code of 400 Bad Request405 Method Not Allowed.

Parameters

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update=DELETE DATA { 
   GRAPH <http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/default/vitro-kb-2> { 
      <http://test.domain/ns#book1> 
          <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> 
          "Design Patterns" . 
    } 
}

A more complex deletion

This update removes an Email address from a Person in VIVO. The Person is related to a VCard:ContactInfo object, which is related to a VCard:EMail object, which has the email address in a data property.

curl -i -d 'email=testAdmin@mydomain.edu' -d 'password=Password' -d '@delete_email.ru' 'http://localhost:8080/vivo/api/sparqlUpdate'

update=
PREFIX obo:      <http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/>
PREFIX vcard:    <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#>

DELETE {
  GRAPH <http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/default/vitro-kb-2> {
    ?contactInfo vcard:hasEmail ?emailObject .
    ?emailObject ?p1 ?o .
  }
} WHERE {
  GRAPH <http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/default/vitro-kb-2> {
    <http://vivo.mydomain.edu/individual/n4295> obo:ARG_2000028 ?contactInfo .
    ?contactInfo vcard:hasEmail ?emailObject .
    ?emailObject vcard:email "my.primary@email.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string> .
    ?emailObject ?p1 ?o .
  }
}

Big Files

For big files one can also use the SPARQL LOAD command. For this, you have to first create the RDF file with the triples that you want to add make it accessible at a URL that VIVO can access. In the example below, the RDF file containing the triples are the data.rdf (available in the root directory of the web server that respond by the address myserver.address.xxx) and the sparql file below contains the LOAD command to be execute by the SPARQL VIVO API.

update=LOAD <http://myserver.address.xxx/data.rdf> into graph <http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/default/vitro-kb-2>

The command should be the same used in the last examples where USER is a user email authorized to access the SPARQL API (see below) or the email of the root user (created during the install process). The PASSWORD.

curl -d 'email=USER' -d 'password=PASSWORD' -d '@import.sparql' 'http://localhost:8080/vivo/api/sparqlUpdate'

A Python example

Ted Lawless of Brown University has created a Python program to illustrate the SPARQL Update API. You can find it here: https://gist.github.com/lawlesst/6300573#file-vupdate-py

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@prefix auth: <http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/ns/vitro/authorization#> .
@prefix simplePermission: <java:edu.cornell.mannlib.vitro.webapp.auth.permissions.SimplePermission#> .
 
# Authorize the ADMIN role to use the SPARQL Update API
auth:ADMIN auth:hasPermission simplePermission:UseSparqlUpdateApi .
.

Comment: Actually, this is not 100% true. The root user can always use the SPARQL API and the file [vivo]/rdf/auth/everytime/permission_config.n3 already contains the line above commented. One only need to uncomment this line to enable the API.