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RDFLib

RDFLib is a pure Python package for working with RDF. It contains:

  • Parsers & Serializers

    • for RDF/XML, N3, NTriples, N-Quads, Turtle, TriG, TriX, JSON-LD, HexTuples, RDFa and Microdata

  • Store implementations

    • memory stores
    • persistent, on-disk stores, using databases such as BerkeleyDB
    • remote SPARQL endpoints

  • Graph interface

    • to a single graph
    • or to multiple Named Graphs within a dataset

  • SPARQL 1.1 implementation

    • both Queries and Updates are supported

Security considerations

RDFLib is designed to access arbitrary network and file resources, in some cases these are directly requested resources, in other cases they are indirectly referenced resources.

If you are using RDFLib to process untrusted documents or queries you should take measures to restrict file and network access.

For information on available security measures, see the RDFLib Security Considerations documentation.

Getting started

If you have never used RDFLib, the following will help get you started:

In depth

If you are familiar with RDF and are looking for details on how RDFLib handles it, these are for you:

Versioning

RDFLib follows Semantic Versioning 2.0.0, which can be summarised as follows:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes
  2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner
  3. PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes

For developers

Source Code

The rdflib source code is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib where you can lodge Issues and create Pull Requests to help improve this community project!

The RDFLib organisation on GitHub at https://github.com/RDFLib maintains this package and a number of other RDF and RDFLib-related packaged that you might also find useful.

Further help & Contact

If you would like help with using RDFLib, rather than developing it, please post a question on StackOverflow using the tag [rdflib]. A list of existing [rdflib] tagged questions can be found here.

You might also like to join RDFLib’s dev mailing list or use RDFLib’s GitHub discussions section.

The chat is available at gitter or via matrix #RDFLib_rdflib:gitter.im.

History

RDFLib is one of the oldest continuously maintained Python libraries for Semantic Web/RDF work. Its history goes back to 2002, only a few years after RDF itself emerged from the W3C. The original author was Daniel “eikeon” Krech but, of course, there have been many, many contributors to it since then, just see the long and illustrious file of CONTRIBUTORS.

Timeline summary

  • 2002 — RDFLib begins
  • 2004 — RDFLib 2.0
  • 2005 — modern Graph abstraction emerges
  • 2006 — SPARQL first supported
  • 2010 — RDFLib 3.0; SPARQL temporarily separated into rdfextras
  • 2013 — RDFLib 4.0; SPARQL 1.1 returns to core; Dataset introduced
  • 2017 — 4.2.2, followed by a long stable period
  • 2020 — RDFLib 5.0; final Python-2-supporting major version
  • 2021 — RDFLib 6.0; Python 3 only, JSON-LD integrated
  • 2023 — RDFLib 7.0
  • 2026 — RDFLib 7.6, with RDF4J/GraphDB integration.

Early Years

RDFLib already had RDF/XML parsing, literals, blank nodes, triple stores and serialization right back in November 2002 with the 1.1 release with context support - now Named Graphs - appearing in December of that same year.

RDFLib 2.1, released in April 2005, merged the previous TripleStore and InformationStore concepts into the Graph class which remains the centre of RDFLib today. N3 support arrived in the 2.3 series, and SPARQL query support was added in RDFLib 2.3.2 in August 2006.

Teenager

RDFLib 3.0.0 was released on 13 May 2010 and move a lot of functionality into plugins, to keep the core small. This is still the approach today with RDF inferencing recently being added as a plugin.

In 2013, RDF 1.1 features started appearing in the 4.x releases and SPARQStore too. For the 4.1 release, RDFLib had over 2,000 unit tests.

Stable times

From 2017 to 2020, RDFLib 4.2.2 was the stable release with 5.0.0 in April 2020 just rolling up small fixes and improvements that had accumulated over time: no major changes

Post Python 2

Version 6.0.0 arrived on 20 July 2021, dropping Python 2 and Python versions before 3.7. JSON-LD handling was internalised and type annotations started to get applied widely.

7 and beyond

RDFLib 7.0.0 was released on 2 August 2023. Its breaking changes were small, but it began cleaning up some long-standing RDFLib behaviours, particularly around Dataset, default graphs and the publicID argument to parse(). Python 3.7 support was dropped.