RDFlib

RDFLib, is a volunteer-run GitHub organization that maintains is a collection of Python tools for working with RDF data, principally the rdflib package.

rdflib package

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
• 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

7.1.3 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
8.x	–	Current main branch, unstable release. Due for a major v8 release in July - Spet. 2025
7.1.4	26 Mar 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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