RDFLib

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

The main tool is the rdflib package which contains most of the 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
• 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
• SPARQL 1.1 implementation
  • supporting SPARQL 1.1 Queries & Updates
  • SPARQL function extension mechanisms
• SPARQL results wrapping
  • turning SPARQL results from file graphs or SPARQL Endpoints into Python objects
  • formerly a stand-alone package, SPARQLWrapper the main rdflib package now does everything it did

Many 3rd party packages support additional Stores, parsers etc. via a plugins interface, e.g. HTD scalable, read-only storage.

Other RDFLib packages

The other RDFLib repositories are shown in logos or green relating to RDFLib’s internal modules in blue:

• 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-leveldb - A LevelDB based Store for rdflib
  • 3rd party:
    • Neo4J - using Neo4J as a back-end. Even support RDF-Star
• Parsers/Serializers:
  • RDFLib:
    • RDF/XML, JSON-LD, Turtle/N# - built in to 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
• SPARQL client:
  • sparqlwrapper - a simple Python wrapper around a SPARQL service to remotely execute your queries
• OWL Reasoning & Documentation:
  • OWL-RL - A simple implementation of the OWL2 RL Profile on top of RDFLib
  • pyLODE - An OWL ontology documentation tool using Python and templating, based on LODE.
• 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
  • Prez-UI - a Vue.js front-end for Prez

Please see the list of all packages here:

• https://github.com/RDFLib

Documentation

The main source of RDFLib documentation is online at https://rdflib.readthedocs.io. That contains pages handwritten by RDFLib contributors and also auto-generated pages from the rdflib code.

RDFLib’s code repository, https://github.com/rdflib/rdflib/, also contains some intro documentation in its 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.

Releases

7.6.0 is the current release (Feb, 2026) and a major release of a version 8 is expected in the later half of 2026.

Some major historical releases of RDFLib are:

Release	Date	Note
7.6.0	13 Feb 2026	Clients for RDF4J & GraphDB APIs, fixes to the cbd() function and more
7.4.0	30 Oct 2025	Added support for Python 3.12 - 3.14 testing; moved to new MKDocs documentation
7.3.0	24 Oct 2025	Fixed some long-standing Dataset issues and added deprecation notices for v8 removal
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:

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

You can also raise issues here:

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

Support & Contacts

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

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

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