Contributing Guide

Thank you for considering contributing to RDFLib. Contributors should understand and agree with the RDFLib Charter, below.

Charter

Vision

The RDFLib community wishes to provide a free and open source toolkit for the manipulation of RDF data.

This provision is for the community and by the community with contributors giving their time and skills freely and asking for nothing in return, other than acknowledgements of them as contributors.

The toolkit is released for use under the BSD 3-Clause License to be as permissible as possibly: users can do what they wish with the toolkit.

Scope

The community implements what it perceives to be core RDF manipulation functions within the RDFLib main library. It also implements specifications related to RDF, such as the SPARQL Query Language, SHACL the Shapes Validation Language, RDFS and OWL reasoning and the parsing and serialisation of RDF file formats. Some of these related implementations are modules within RDFLib, others are stand-alone repositories within the RDFLib family. See https://rdflib.dev for a listing.

The community encourages implementers of other RDFLib-related libraries to communicate them to us.

Membership

There are no restrictions on users of, and contributors to RDFLib, therefore there is no strict membership category. We ask only that contributors contribute according to the various technical protocols in the Developers guide and the Documentation guide.

Governance

RDFLib had been governed by an evolving set of core developers over its 20+ year lifetime. There are no strict rules as to who is or isn’t a core developer and the recent practice for organisation has been for the most involved developers to contact the mailing list and recent contributors directly to discuss major releases and other issues.

If you would like to be involved in core development and/or governance, please just create an Issue in the issue tracker about this, or contact the most active developers and/or the mailing list.

Ways to contribute

Some ways in which you can contribute to RDFLib are:

Create Issues on our Issue Tracker for things that don’t work or for feature requests
Address open issues: by creating Pull Requests
Fix expected failure tests:
Add additional expected failure tests for open issues:
Add tests for untested code:
Review pull requests marked with the label.
Answer questions on Stack Overflow:
Convert unittest based tests to pytest based tests:
Add, correct or improve docstrings:
Update the RDFLib Wikipedia entry:
Update the RDFLib Wikidata entry:
Participate on Gitter/Matrix chat:
Participate in GitHub discussions:
Fix linting failures (see ruff settings in pyproject.toml and # noqa: directives in the codebase).