As I replied on the DBpedia mailing list, you can use something like
select * where {
?influencer dbpedia-owl:influenced ?influencee .
dbpedia-owl:Person ^a ?influencer, ?influencee .
}
That uses some syntactic sugar that SPARQL defines, but without it, it's simply
select * where {
?influencer dbpedia-owl:influenced ?influencee .
?influencer a dbpedia-owl:Person .
?influencee a dbpedia-owl:Person .
}
It doesn't matter which order you put the triple patterns in. E.g., you could also write
select * where {
?influencer a dbpedia-owl:Person .
?influencer dbpedia-owl:influenced ?influencee .
?influencee a dbpedia-owl:Person .
}
or
select * where {
?influencer a dbpedia-owl:Person .
?influencee a dbpedia-owl:Person .
?influencer dbpedia-owl:influenced ?influencee .
}
RDF is a graph based data representation, and a graph is a set of directed edges. The order of triples in the pattern doesn't matter.