RDF Libraries for Python¶

There are several RDF processing libraries for Python, however many seem abandoned. RdfLib is the primary library that is still maintained.

Active:

• RdfLib (see RdfLib) - Has utilities for constructing triplestores, loading and parsing rdf, searching, and other functions.

  • Actively maintained as of late 2023

  • Easily installed with pip, pure python implementation

• SparqlWrapper is provided by RDFLib and provides utilities for querying a sparql endpoint (such as an RDF4J triplestore) from Python and parsing output

  • Latest release (as of Oct. 2023) in 2022

Abandoned:

• Oort is a toolkit using rdflib, Paste and Genshi, focusing on Web views of RDF graphs.

  • Last release was 0.4 in 2007

• RedlandRdf - http://librdf.org/docs/python.html -

  • Redland is a python [and other-lang] wrapper around a C library.

  • The interface is not as pythonic as rdflib, but “feels” about the same.

  • Redland uses Raptor for parsing/serialization; Raptor supports NTriples, RDF/XML, Turtle, RSS, Atom.

  • Latest release around 2014

• Rx4RDF - http://rx4rdf.liminalzone.org - is an application stack for building RDF-based applications and web sites. It uses either 4Suite, rdflib or RedlandRdf as the RDF store and layers on the following:

  • RxPath lets you query, transform and update RDF using familar XML technologies like XPath, XSLT and XUpdate.

  • Raccoon is a simple application server that uses an RDF model for its data store, roughly analogous to RDF as Apache Cocoon is to XML.

  • Rhizome is a content management and delivery system that runs on Raccoon that treates everything (structure and content) as RDF and lets you edit the RDF in a Wiki-like fashion.

  • Latest release around 2004

• SemanticWebApplicationPlatform - http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/ - has a lot of stuff, feels like a big lump of code with little differentiation - looks great, but, what is it?

  • It’s a big lump of code. 🙂 It’s the W3C-semweb-hacker’s playground.

  • It has migrated to github, but is described as historic

  • Last formal release in 2007, but updated in 2022

  • Primary contributor is Tim Berners-Lee

• sqltriples is a triple store implementation which uses relational databases to offer transactional storage and enhanced querying.

  • Latest release in 2007