An OWL ontology documentation tool using Python and templating, based on LODE.

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 Pythons RDF manipulation module, rdflib. An ontology to be documented is parsed and inspected using rdflib and HTML is generated using basic Python scripting and Python's Jinja2 templating.

• 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 more modern & simpler HTML
• catering for a wider range of ontology options such as:
  • schema.org domainIncludes & rangeIncludes for properties
• better Agent linking
  • foaf:Agent or schema:Person objects for creators, contributors & publishers
  • you can still use simple string peoperties like dc:contributor "Nicholas J. Car" too if you really must!

<ontology_x>
    dct:creator [
        sdo:name "Nicholas J. Car" ;
        sdo:identifier <http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8742-7730> ;
    ] ;

• smarter CURIES - pyLODE looks up well-known prefixes to make more/better CURIES
• active development
  • this software is in use and will be improved for the foreseeable future so we will cater fro more and more things
  • recent ontology documentation initiatives such as the MOD Ontology will be handled, if requested

Currently pyLODE presents as a Python & BASH command-line utility, pylode/cli.py & pylode/bin/pylode respectively. Windows scripts may appear soon. All use the same command line arguments.

An online version of it will be available soon too, just as LODE is (was) available online.

For the command line running of pyLODE, these are the command line argument options:

• -i or --inputfile, required if -u not used
  • The RDF ontology file you wish to generate HTML for Must be in either Turtle, RDF/XML, JSON-LD or N-Triples formats indicated by the file type extensions .rdf, .owl, .ttl, .n3, .nt, .json respectively
• -u or --url, required if -1 not used
  • The RDF ontology you wish to generate HTML for, onlin. Must be an absolute URL that can be resolved to RDF, preferably via Content Negotiation.
• -c or --css, optional, default 'false'
  • Whether (true) or not (false) to copy the default CSS file to the output directory.
• -o or --outputfile, optional
  • A name you wish to assign to the output file. Will be postfixed with .html. If not specified, the name of the input file or last segment of RDF URI will be used, + .html.

This call to the BASH script in pylode/bin/ will create an HTML document for an ontology called placenames.html and save it with a basic CSS file into pylode/output_files/:

$ ./pylode -i ../example/prof.ttl --css true

pyLODE understands the following ontology annotations:

• ontology metadata

  • imports - owl:imports
  • title - rdfs:label or skos:prefLabel or dct:title
  • version_uri - owl:versionIRI
  • publishers, creators, contributors
    • either dc:publisher etc. as a string or dct:publisher etc. as a foaf:Agent or schema:Person with foaf:name & foaf:homepage or schema:name & schema:identifier properties respectively
  • created, modified, issued - dct:created etc., all as xsd:date or xsd:dateTime datatype properties
  • description - rdf:comment or skos:definition or dct:description
  • versionInfo - owl:versionInfo as a string

• classes

  • per rdfs:Class or owl:Class
  • title - rdfs:label or skos:prefLabel or dct:title
  • description - rdf:comment or skos:definition or dct:description
  • usage note - a skos:scopeNote string
  • super classes - by declaring a class to be owl:subClassOf something
  • sub classes - pyLODE will work these out itself
  • restrictions - by declaring a class to be owl:subClassOf of an owl:Restriction with any of the normal cardinality or property existence etc. restrictions

• properties

  • per owl:ObjectProperty, owl:DatatypeProperty or owl:AnnotationProperty
  • title - rdfs:label or skos:prefLabel or dct:title
  • description - rdf:comment or skos:definition or dct:description
  • usage note - a skos:scopeNote string
  • super properties - by declaring a class to be owl:subPropertyOf something
  • sub properties - pyLODE will work these out itself
  • domains - rdfs:domain or schema:domainIncludes
  • ranges - rdfs:range or schema:rangeIncludes

• namespaces

  • pyLODE will honour any namespace prefixes you set and look up others in http://prefix.cc
  • it will either read your ontology's default/base URI in annotations or guess it using a number of methods

• named individuals

  • coming!

To help pyLODE understand more annotations, see Suggestions below.

This tool generates HTML that is shamelessly similar to LODE's styling. That's because we want things to look familiar and LODE's outputs look great.

Feel free to extend your styling with your own CSS.

Soon (June 2019?) an online, hosted, version of this tool will be implemented so you can see it in action live.

This code is licensed using the GPL v3 licence. See the LICENSE file for the deed.

If you use pyLODE, please leave the pyLODE logo in the top left of published HTML pages.

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

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

pyLODE has been tested with all of the ontologies in pylode/examples/ and we are trying to ensure it captures all of their annotations.

Ontologies online using pyLODE:

• Boreholes Profile - http://linked.data.gov.au/def/borehole
• Place Names Profile - http://linked.data.gov.au/def/placenames

See pairs of RDF & HTML files in the pylode/examples/ directory for preprocessed examples.

Author:
Nicholas Car
Senior Experimental Scientist
CSIRO Land & Water, Environmental Informatics Group
nicholas.car@csiro.au