APIs and SPARQL endpoints

APIs, acronym for Application Programming Interface is what allows two machines or software to interact to each other (a graphical user interface, often shortened as GUI, is what allows the interaction between people and software). Since Caliper datasets are expressed in RDF, interaction with them is primarily done using SPARQL, the query language for RDF. Caliper offers a SPARQL “endpoint", reachable via URL, as a way to interact (query) Caliper datasets. 

If are not familiar with the mechanisms of querying online datasets using SPARQL, you can make some tests by using one of the sample SPARQL queries that we have prepared for you, and fire them against the SPARQL endpoint: https://stats.fao.org/caliper/sparql/AllVocs (the graphical interface for the sparql endpoint is powered by YASGUI). 

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced technical specifications for the SPARQL query language and for the SPARQL Protocol (in fact, SPARQL is a recursive acronym, standing for "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language"). The W3C has also produced recommendations for the CSV and TSV formats, the XML format and the JSON format used to return results from SPARQL queries. Therefore, different clients exist to query SPARQL endpoints using different languages, such as Python or Java.