A new and improved version of OntoSpy (1.6.7) is available online. OntoSpy is a lightweight Python library and command line tool for inspecting and visualizing vocabularies encoded in the RDF family of languages.

This update includes support for Python 3, plus various other improvements that make it easier to query semantic web vocabularies using OntoSpy’s interactive shell module. To find out more about Ontospy:

Docs: http://ontospy.readthedocs.org

CheeseShop: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ontospy

Github: https://github.com/lambdamusic/ontospy



Here’s a short video showing a typical sessions with the OntoSpy repl:

What’s new in this release

The main new features of version 1.6.7:



added support for Python 3.0 (thanks to a pull request from https://github.com/T-002)

the import [file | uri | repo | starter-pack] command that makes it easier to load models into the local repository. You can import a local RDF file or a web resource via its URI. The repo option allows to select an ontology by listing the one available in a couple of online public repositories; finally the starter-pack option can be used to download automatically a few widely used vocabularies (e.g. FOAF,DC etc..) into the local repository – mostly useful after a fresh installation in order to get started

the info [toplayer | parents | children | ancestors | descendants] command allows to print more detailed info about entities

added an incremental search mode based on text patterns e.g. to reduce the options returned by the ls command

calling the serialize command at ontology level now serializes the whole graph

made the caching functionality version-dependent

added json serialization option (via rdflib-jsonld)




Install/update simply by typing pip install ontospy -U in your terminal window (see this page for more info).

Coming up next

I’d really like to add more output visualisations e.g. VivaGraphJS or one of the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit.

Probably even more interesting, I’d like to refactor the code generating visualisations so that it allows people to develop their own via a standard API and then publishing them on GitHub.

Lastly, more support for instance management: querying and creating instances from any loaded ontology.

Of course, any comments or suggestions are welcome as usual – either using the form below or via GitHub. Cheers!