How to implement SPARQL with DBPedia

The query as written in the book is what ought to be possible. It assumes that there are nodes representing people, and nodes representing places, and a "namedFor" predicate that connects them. But in fact, dbpedia doesn't have this. It has nodes representing places, and a "namedFor" predicate, but the predicate connects to untyped text strings instead of people. Signified's answer will get you only some of the data. For a little more, try this:

SELECT ?location ?person
WHERE {
  ?location <http://dbpedia.org/property/namedFor> ?person
  FILTER(regex(?person,"(^George Washington)|(George Washington$)"))
}

To see why I did that, try this:

SELECT ?location ?person
WHERE {
  ?location <http://dbpedia.org/property/namedFor> ?person
  FILTER(regex(?person,"George Washington"))
}

Ponder these for a couple minutes and you'll realize that a) you have no idea how many other permutations of George Washington's name might have been used, b) you have no way of knowing whether those "George Washington" strings all represent the first president, or nine different guys named George Washington, or some combination of those. You might then conclude that this is idiotic, and misses the point of the Semantic Web pretty much entirely.

And then you might notice that the state of Washington isn't even on this list. And then you might start to suspect, correctly, that it's generally a waste of time querying dbpedia for anything where you actually care about the answers.

Given this is backended by Virtuoso another query that seems to work is

SELECT *
WHERE {
?location <http://dbpedia.org/property/namedFor> ?label.
?label bif:contains '"George Washington"'
}

The bif: function is much faster than a FILTER regex.

For more fun (and faster response time), you can try using one of the built-in functions (bifs) of the Virtuoso server powering the DBpedia.org SPARQL endpoint --

SELECT DISTINCT  ?s1  AS  ?Feature 
                 ?s2  AS  ?NamedFor  
   WHERE { ?s1  a                                       <http://www.opengis.net/gml/_Feature>  . 
           ?s1  <http://dbpedia.org/property/namedFor>  ?s2                                    .
           ?s2  bif:contains                            'WASHINGTON'                           .
         } 
ORDER BY ASC (?s2) 
         ASC (?s1) 
LIMIT 100  
OFFSET 0

Results are here