title: Effective methods for DBpedia queries
body: <p>I've been trying to implement a query to find the birth date of a given person using DBPedia.  This seems easy enough but I'm finding a lot of different tags to match names and birth dates, not all of which show up under all entities.
  For instances we have <code>dbp:name</code>, <code>dbp:birthName</code>, <code>foaf:givenName</code>, <code>foaf:surname</code>, <code>dbo:birthDate</code>, <code>dbo:birthYear</code>, <code>dbp:dateOfBirth</code>, etc. </p>
  
  <p>I'm wondering if...</p>
  
  <p>1 - Is there a higher level library I can use (preferably in python but Java is ok too) that "understands" these different tags and that can help form appropriate queries to search and combine the different information.</p>
  
  <p>2 - Is there any guidance on how to accomplish this. For instance, is it better to use the ontology (<code>dbo</code>) or the property (<code>dbp</code>) or the <code>foaf</code>.  I'm also curious if a common approach is to pre-download all the possible tags and search on all that seem applicable and then select the "best" returned data. If someone could offer some guidance or point me to a good tutorial, I'd appreciate it.  I've found some info on the web but nothing that really addresses my question.</p>