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, JSON-LD and even HexTuples
- a Graph interface which can be backed by any one of a number of Store implementations
- Store implementations for in-memory, persistent on disk (Berkeley DB) and remote SPARQL endpoints
- additional Stores can be supplied via plugins
- a SPARQL 1.1 implementation - supporting SPARQL 1.1 Queries and Update statements
- SPARQL function extension mechanisms
Many 3rd party packages support additional Stores, parsers etc.
RDFLib Family of packages
The RDFLib community maintains many RDF-related Python code repositories with different purposes. Most of the currently operating packages are shown here:
- Core:
- rdflib - the rdflib core
- Stores:
- RDFLib:
- rdflib-sqlalchemy - RDFLib store using SQLAlchemy dbapi as back-end
- rdflib-hdt - A Store back-end for rdflib to allow for reading and querying HDT documents
- rdflib-zodb - RDFLib Store backed by ZODB3
- rdflib-kyotocabinet - RDFLib Store backed by Kyoto Cabinet
- rdflib-leveldb - A LevelDB based Store for rdflib
- 3rd party:
- Neo4J - using Neo4J as a back-end. Even support RDF-Star
- RDFLib:
- Parsers/Serializers:
- RDFLib:
- pymicrodata - This a module to extract RDF from an HTML5 page annotated with microdata (archived)
- pyrdfa3 - RDFa 1.1 distiller/parser library: can extract RDFa 1.1 (and RDFa 1.0, if properly set via a @Version attribute) from (X)HTML, SVG, or XML (archived)
- 3rd party:
- FunOWL - Functional Syntax
- RDFLib:
- SPARQL tools:
- sparqlwrapper - a simple Python wrapper around a SPARQL service to remotely execute your queries
- OWL Reasoning & Documentation:
- SHACL validation:
- pySHACL - A Python validator for SHACL
- Linked Data APIs:
- Prez - A data-configurable Linked Data API framework that delivers profiles of Knowledge Graph data according to the Content Negotiation by Profile standard
Please see the list of all packages here:
Documentation
RDFLib’s code repository, https://github.com/rdflib/rdflib/, contains some intro documentation in it’s README page, which is replicated to RDFLib’s PyPI page, https://pypi.org/project/rdflib/.
RDFLib also contains a set of documented examples in the example/
folder within the code repository.
However, the main source of RDFLib documentation is online at https://rdflib.readthedocs.io. That contains pages hand written by RDFLib contributors and auto-generated pages from the RDFLib codes.
Releases
7.1.3 is the current release (Jan, 2025) and a major release of a version 8 is expected in the first half of 2025.
some major historical releases of RDFLib are:
| Release | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 7.1.3 | 10 Jan 2025 | Minor updates on 7.0.0 including deterministic serialisation, improved type hinting etc. |
| 7.0.0 | 02 Aug 2023 | A major release with relatively slight breaking changes, new features and bug fixes |
| 6.0.0 | 20 Jul 2021 | The next major update with lots of auto-update PRs from dependabot etc |
| 5.0.0 | 18 Apr 2020 | The first update in many years. Very compatible with 4.2.2 |
| 4.2.2 | 30 Jan 2017 | A stable release used widely for many years |
| … | … | … |
| 1.1.1 | 12 Nov 2002 | First release! |
See the CHANGELOG in the code repository for full details.
Contributing
RDFLib survives and grows via user contributions! Please consider lodging Pull Requests here:
You can also raise issues here:
Support & Contacts
For general “how do I…” queries, please use https://stackoverflow.com and tag your question with rdflib.
Existing questions:
If you want to contact the RDFLib maintainers, please do so via:
- the rdflib-dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/rdflib-dev
- the chat, which is available at gitter or via matrix #RDFLib_rdflib:gitter.im