Documentation

Ontolutils is a Python package that provides a object-oriented way of working with ontologies. Also, namespace objects are available to easily work with IRIs. It is maintained on GitHub and can be installed via pip:

pip install ontolutils

The package mainly depends on two libraries:

  • rdflib

  • pydantic

Quick example

The object oriented way of defining an ontology class which then can be used to create validated instances and serialize them to RDF is shown below. More information can be found in the documentation

from pydantic import EmailStr, Field
from pydantic import HttpUrl, model_validator

from ontolutils import Thing, urirefs, namespaces, as_id


@namespaces(prov="https://www.w3.org/ns/prov#",
            foaf="https://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/",
            m4i='http://w3id.org/nfdi4ing/metadata4ing#')
@urirefs(Person='prov:Person',
         firstName='foaf:firstName',
         lastName='foaf:lastName',
         mbox='foaf:mbox',
         orcidId='m4i:orcidId')
class Person(Thing):
    firstName: str
    lastName: str = Field(default=None, alias="last_name")  # you may provide an alias
    mbox: EmailStr = Field(default=None, alias="email")
    orcidId: HttpUrl = Field(default=None, alias="orcid_id")

    # the following will ensure, that if orcidId is set, it will be used as the id
    @model_validator(mode="before")
    def _change_id(self):
        return as_id(self, "orcidId")


p = Person(id="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8729-0482",
           firstName='Matthias', last_name='Probst')
# as we have set an alias, we can also use "lastName":
p = Person(id="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8729-0482",
           firstName='Matthias', lastName='Probst')
# The jsonld representation of the object will be the same in both cases:
json_ld_serialization = p.model_dump_jsonld()
# Alternatively use
serialized_str = p.serialize(format="json-ld")

{
  "@context": {
    "owl": "http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#",
    "rdfs": "http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#",
    "prov": "https://www.w3.org/ns/prov#",
    "foaf": "https://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/",
    "m4i": "http://w3id.org/nfdi4ing/metadata4ing#"
  },
  "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8729-0482",
  "@type": "prov:Person",
  "foaf:firstName": "Matthias",
  "foaf:lastName": "Probst"
}

Note

This project is under current development and is happy to receive ideas, code contributions as well as bug and issue reports. Thank you!