RDFLib

RDFLib is a pure Python package for working with RDF. RDFLib contains most things you need to work with RDF, including:

• parsers and serializers for RDF/XML, N3, NTriples, N-Quads, Turtle, TriX, Trig and JSON-LD (via a plugin).
• a Graph interface which can be backed by any one of a number of Store implementations
• store implementations for in-memory storage and persistent storage on top of the Berkeley DB
• a SPARQL 1.1 implementation - supporting SPARQL 1.1 Queries and Update statements

RDFlib Family of packages

The RDFlib community maintains many RDF-related Python code repositories with different purposes. For example:

• rdflib - the rdflib core
• sparqlwrapper - a simple Python wrapper around a SPARQL service to remotely execute your queries
• pyLODE - An OWL ontology documentation tool using Python and templating, based on LODE.
• rdflib-jsonld - an rdflib plugin that is an implementation of JSON-LD

Please see the list for all packages/repositories here:

• https://github.com/RDFLib

Installation

RDFLib may be installed with Python's package management tool pip:

$ pip install rdflib

Alternatively manually download the package from the Python Package Index (PyPI) at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rdflib

The current version of RDFLib is 5.0.0, see the CHANGELOG.md file for what's new in this release.

Getting Started

RDFLib aims to be a pythonic RDF API. rdflib's main data object is a Graph which is a Python collection of RDF Subject, Predicate, Object Triples:

To create graph and load it with RDF data from DBPedia then print the results:

import rdflib
g = rdflib.Graph()
g.load('http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web')

for s, p, o in g:
    print(s, p, o)

The components of the triples are URIs (resources) or Literals (values).

URIs are grouped together by namespace, common namespaces are included in RDFLib:

from rdflib.namespace import DC, DCTERMS, DOAP, FOAF, SKOS, OWL, RDF, RDFS, VOID, XMLNS, XSD

You can use them like this:

semweb = rdflib.URIRef('http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web')
type = g.value(semweb, rdflib.RDFS.label)

Where rdflib.RDFS is the RDFS Namespace, graph.value returns an object of the triple-pattern given (or an arbitrary one if more exist).

Or like this, adding a triple to a graph g:

g.add((
    rdflib.URIRef("http://example.com/person/nick"),
    FOAF.givenName,
    rdflib.Literal("Nick", datatype=XSD.string)
))

The triple (in n-triples notation) <http://example.com/person/nick> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/givenName> "Nick"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string> . is created where the property FOAF.giveName is the URI <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/givenName> and XSD.string is the URI <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>.

You can bind namespaces to prefixes to shorten the URIs for RDF/XML, Turtle, N3, TriG, TriX & JSON-LD serializations:

g.bind("foaf", FOAF)
g.bind("xsd", XSD)

This will allow the n-triples triple above to be serialised like this:

print(g.serialize(format="turtle").decode("utf-8"))

With these results:

PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>

<http://example.com/person/nick> foaf:givenName "Nick"^^xsd:string .

New Namespaces can also be defined:

dbpedia = rdflib.Namespace('http://dbpedia.org/ontology/')

abstracts = list(x for x in g.objects(semweb, dbpedia['abstract']) if x.language=='en')

See also ./examples

Features

The library contains parsers and serializers for RDF/XML, N3, NTriples, N-Quads, Turtle, TriX, RDFa and Microdata. JSON-LD parsing/serializing can be achieved using the JSON-LD plugin.

The library presents a Graph interface which can be backed by any one of a number of Store implementations.

This core RDFLib package includes store implementations for in-memory storage and persistent storage on top of the Berkeley DB.

A SPARQL 1.1 implementation is included - supporting SPARQL 1.1 Queries and Update statements.

RDFLib is open source and is maintained on GitHub. RDFLib releases, current and previous are listed on PyPI

Multiple other projects are contained within the RDFlib "family", see https://github.com/RDFLib/.

Documentation

See https://rdflib.readthedocs.io for our documentation built from the code.

Support

For general "how do I..." queries, please use https://stackoverflow.com and tag your question with rdflib. Existing questions:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rdflib

Releases

See https://rdflib.dev for the release schedule.

Contributing

rdflib survives and grows via user contributions! Please consider lodging Pull Requests here:

• https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib/pulls

You can also raise issues here:

• https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib/issues

Contacts

If you want to contact the rdflib maintainers, please do so via the rdflib-dev mailing list:

• https://groups.google.com/group/rdflib-dev