Running the Interactive User Guides

GraphDB includes a set of interactive tutorials that will walk you through key GraphDB capabilities using the Workbench user interface. They can be accessed from Help ‣ Interactive guides, as well as via the Take me to the guides button in the center panel of the GraphDB Workbench startup screen.

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Available Guides

Each guide has a name, a description, a level (Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced), and a Run the guide run-guide-button button, which starts the tutorial. Currently, GraphDB 10.1 offers two such tutorials:

  • The Star Wars guide: Designed for beginners and using the Star Wars dataset, which you can download within the guide, this tutorial will walk you through some basic GraphDB capabilities such as creating a repository, importing RDF data from a file in it, and exploring the data through the Visual graph.

  • The Movies database guide: Also designed for beginners and using a dataset with movie information, this tutorial will show you some additional capabilities like exploring your data from the class hierarchy perspective, some SPARQL queries, as well as exploring RDF through the tabular view.

Running a Guide

To start a guide, click Run run-guide-button . This will activate a series of dialog boxes that will guide you through the steps of the tutorial. While the guide is running, the remaining part of the Workbench remains darker and is inactive.

Each window explains what is going to happen next or asks you to perform a certain action. The window title shows the name of the current action, the number of steps it comprises, and the progress of the action, e.g., step 1 of the Create repository action that consists of 7 steps. Before each major action, you are provided with an overview of what the particular view of the Workbench is used for.

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The little icon left of the title of each step provides additional information about it, for example:

_images/interactive-guide-step2.png

To proceed to the next step, either click/type in the highlighted active area in the Workbench (Setup in the above example), or press the Next button. We recommend the former as it essentially is exactly what you would be doing in the user interface if you were not in the guide, thus familiarizing yourself with it more easily.

If you attempt to close the dialog window, GraphDB will ask you to confirm the action before closing it.