In my alternative existence as a consultant, Microsoft Excel is usually my
weapon of choice for data analysis. And so, in my search for tools to take the
Semantic Web into the business domain, I looked for a way to link Excel with RDF
data.

Suffice to say, whilst there are some CSV generation tools and SQL/SPARQL
cross-overs and stuff like that out on the web there seemed to be nothing that
links Excel to RDF natively, i.e., through the standard data connections using
OLE DB.

In a moment of insanity (but a great learning experience), I gave myself the
challenge of writing an OLE DB provider for SPARQL. It is built on top of the
SemWeb libary which has saved a substantial amount of effort and also brings
some powerful functionality to the table very quickly (Thanks, Joshua!)

The provider as constructed implements a readonly OLE provider that supports all
four SPARQL query types and interfaces to SemWeb through COM-Callable Wrapper.
It is not extensively tested yet but seems to work with most of the queries I
have now put through it, and of course being built on SemWeb it is able to read
both local and remote SPARQL sources.

If you would like to try it out then you can download an evaluation copy from
here http://www.sixhills-software.com/SPARQLProv/

Any feedback would be appreciated, and do let me know if you find any problems.

Regards
Andy