wikipedia_abstract_from_dbpedia.py

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
import urllib

dbpedia_endpoint = "http://dbpedia.org/sparql?"
ns = {'ns': '{http://www.w3.org/2005/sparql-results#}'}
result_xpath ='%(ns)sresults/%(ns)sresult/%(ns)sbinding/%(ns)sliteral' % ns

def wikipedia_abstract_from_dbpedia(dbpedia_key):
    sparql = """
    SELECT ?abstract
    WHERE {
    { <http://dbpedia.org/resource/%s> <http://dbpedia.org/property/abstract> ?abstract .
    FILTER langMatches( lang(?abstract), 'en') }
    }
    """ % dbpedia_key
    url = dbpedia_endpoint + urllib.urlencode({'query': sparql})
    et = ET.parse(urllib.urlopen(url))
    return et.find(result_xpath).text