API with SPARQL endpoint

[jornfranke]

Hi,

Thanks for inviting to the search preview. I will investigate it in more details in the coming weeks.

Is there a plan to support semantic web standards for querying, e.g. SPARQL? The search syntax seems that it could have some overlap with SPARQL. The nice thing with such a semantic integration would be that one could write plugins that directly provide assistance to the user what they do. For example, Eclipse offers some basic semantics via project natures, where one can see which tool is used in the project and how. This could be linked to Github CodeSearch using a SPARQL endpoint.

SPARQL makes sense as it would not require a custom syntax and a Github Code Ontology could also be a "standard" for other code repositories, e.g. enterprise internal ones that may not even use Github in all projects.

So for instance a user is working in a Java project with Gradle. She/he works on a build.gradle and maybe hovers over a dependency - automatically all issues related to that dependency version in Github are highlighted.

Another example is a user that writes a call to securely connect to a service. CodeSearch can highlight repositories to config files or code on how other people secured it - maybe also directly feed some best practices not coming from code, but from OWASP or similar (maybe LinkedData?).

Certainly, there are overlaps with Github Copilot. Nevertheless, Copilot only provides ONE version of what it thinks it makes sense. This can be useful in some cases, but might be not so useful in other cases where human judgement is needed with actual background on what the project is about, its milestones and timelines.

Implementing such a feature is of course time and resource intensive, but I strongly believe we have to review our paradigm of search: We want less and less go to an individual search page where we search out of context. We want to have the right search in the right tool integrated that we use to work on our task.

Thanks a lot again!

best regards