pylode 3.0.1

Contents

1. Quick Intro

2. Use

3. What pyLODE understands

4. Examples

5. Installation

6. Differences from LODE

7. Releases

8. License

9. Citation

10. Collaboration

11. Contacts

Quick Intro

The Live OWL Documentation Environment tool (LODE) is a well-known (in Semantic Web circles) Java & XSLT-based tool used to generate human-readable HTML documents for OWL and RDF ontologies. That tool is now a bit dated (old-style HTML, use of older technologies like XSLT) and it’s (online version) is not always online.

This tool is a complete re-implementation of LODE’s functionality using Python and Python’s RDF manipulation module, rdflib. An ontology to be documented is parsed and inspected using rdflib and HTML is generated directly, using Python’s dominate package.

Use

The tool can be used in multiple ways:

• BASH command line script

  • pyLODE.sh in bin/

• Windows EXE

  • pyLODE.exe in bin/

• Mac executable

  • pyLODE in bin/

• Python Script

  • cli.py or module

• as-a-service locally

  • via the popular Falcon framework.

  • see server.py in the main folder

• as-a-service online

  • hosted at https://pylode.surroundaustralia.com

usage: cli.py [-h] [-v] [-o OUTPUTFILE] [-c {true,false}] input

positional arguments:
    input                 Input file location or URL

optional arguments:
    -h, --help          show this help message and exit
    -v, --version       show program's version number and exit
    -o OUTPUTFILE,
    --outputfile OUTPUTFILE
                        A name you wish to assign to the output file. Will be
                        postfixed with .html if not already added. If no
                        output file is given, output will be printed to screen
    -c {true,false},
    --css {true,false}
                        Whether (true) or not (false) to include CSS within an
                        output HTML file.

python pylode examples/minimal.ttl -o minimal.html

Examples

The examples/ directory contains multiple pairs of RDF & HTML files generated from them using this version of pyLODE.

You can also see rendered versions of these example files online too:

• minimal.html

• agift.html

• alternates.html

• asgs.html

What pyLODE understands

pyLODE knows about definitional ontologies (owl:Ontology) and the major elements usually fount in them, such as classes (owl:Class or rdf:Class) and properties (``rdf:Property & owl:ObjectProperty etc.).

To see what properties for ontology, class and RDF property documentation pyLODE currently supports, just look in the rdf_elements.py file. All elements’ properties supported are given in property lists there.

pyLODES won’t just translate everything that you can describe in RDF into HTML! This is a conscious design choice to ensure that a certain conventional style of documented ontology is produced. However, surrport for new properties and ontology patterns can be made - just create an Issue on this project’s Issue tracker.

While it does know about instance data, such as Named Individuals, it’s not really designed to document large ontologies containing class instances.

<ontology_x>
    dct:creator [
        sdo:name "Nicholas J. Car" ;
        sdo:identifier <http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8742-7730> ;
        sdo:affiliation [
            sdo:name "SURROUND Australia Pty Ldt." ;
            sdo:url "https://surroundaustralia.com"^^xsd:anyURI ;
        ] ;
    ] ;

Installation

pyLODE is on PyPI, so you can install it using pip as normal:

pip install pylode

Differences from LODE

• command line access

  • you can use this on your own desktop so you don’t need me to maintain a live service for use

• use of modern simple HTML

  • no JavaScript: pyLODE generates static HTML pages

• catering for a wider range of ontology options such as:

  • schema.org domainIncludes & rangeIncludes for properties

• better Agent representation

  • see the Notes on Agents section above

• smarter CURIES

  • pyLODE caches and looks up well-known prefixes to make more/better CURIES

  • it tries to be smart with CURIE presentation by CURIE-ising all URIs it finds, rather than printing them

• reference ontologies property labels

  • pyLODE caches ~ 10 well-known ontologies (RDFS, SKOS etc), properties from which people often use for their ontology documentation. Where these properties are used, the background ontology’s labels are use

• active development

  • pyLODE has been under active development since mid-2019 and is still very much actively developed - it’s not just staying still

  • it will be improved in foreseeable to cater for more and more things

  • recent ontology documentation initiatives such as the MOD Ontology will be handled, if requested

Releases

pyLODE is under continual and constant development. The current developers have a roadmap for enhancements in mind, which is given here, however, since this is an open source project, new developers may join the pyLODE dev community and change/add development priorities.

License

This code is licensed using the BSD 3-Clause licence. See the LICENSE file for the deed. Note Citation below though for attribution.

Citation

If you use pyLODE, please leave the pyLODE logo with a hyperlink back here in the top left of published HTML pages.

Collaboration

The maintainers welcome any collaboration.

If you have suggestions, please email the contacts below or leave Issues in this repository’s Issue tracker.

But the very best thing you could do is create a Pull Request for us to action!

Contacts