Welcome to Owlready’s documentation!

Owlready is a module for ontology-oriented programming in Python: load OWL 2.0 ontologies as Python objects, modify them, save to OWL XML, and perform reasoning via HermiT (included). Owlready allows a transparent access to OWL ontologies (contrary to usual Java-based API).

Owlready has been created at the LIMICS reseach lab, University Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité, INSERM UMRS 1142, Paris 6 University, by Jean-Baptiste Lamy. It was developed during the VIIIP research project funded by ANSM, the French Drug Agency; this is why most examples in this documentation relate to drug ;).

Owlready is available under the GNU LGPL licence v3.

Table of content

• Introduction
  • Short example: What can I do with Owlready?
  • Contact and links
• Managing ontologies
  • Creating an ontology
  • Loading an ontology from OWL
  • Accessing to the content of an ontology
  • Importing other ontologies
  • Saving an ontology to an OWL file
• Classes and Instances (Individuals)
  • Creating a Class
  • Creating subclasses
  • Creating classes dynamically
  • Creating equivalent classes
  • Creating Instances
  • Mutli-Class Instances
• Properties
  • Creating a new class of property
  • Creating a relation
  • Data Property
  • Inverse properties
  • Functional and Inverse Functional properties
  • Creating a subproperty
  • Associating Python alias name to Properties
• Restrictions
  • Restrictions on a Property
  • Class operators
  • One Of restrictions
• Disjointness and open world assumption
  • Disjoint Classes
  • Disjoint Properties
  • Distinct Instances
  • Closing Instances
• Mixing Python and OWL
  • Adding Python methods to an OWL Class
  • Generating Instance names
  • Forward declarations
  • Associating a Python module to an OWL ontology
• Reasoning
  • Setting up everything
  • Running the reasoner
  • Results of the automatic classification
• Annotations
  • Adding an annotation
  • Querying annotations
  • Iterating through annotations
  • Deleting annotations
  • Creating a new class of annotation
• Keys and indexes
  • Creating an index
  • Using the index
• Editing Instances with EditObj3 dialog box generator
  • Generating a dialog box
  • Ordering the Instance’s Properties
  • HTML output
• Limitations
  • Current limits