yamlpyowl

• What it is — yamlpyowl reads ontologies—including individuals and SWRL rules—written in YAML and represents them as Python objects through owlready2. Its goal is to make manually authored ontologies more approachable for contributors who may not know Protégé or OWL syntaxes such as Manchester, while still supporting reasoning and RDF/XML export.

• Key concepts —

  • YAML declarations cover OWL classes, object and data properties, individuals, property facts, and SWRL rules; documented property characteristics include functional and transitive roles.
  • X_RelationConcept is a yamlpyowl extension for modeling n-ary relations: subclasses represent the relation, the parser creates an associated role, and relation_concept_facts creates concrete relation instances.
  • “Proxy individuals” represent knowledge about a class when metaclasses/punning are unavailable; __create_proxy_individual can generate individuals named i<ClassName>.
  • The zebra-puzzle notebook distinguishes asserted knowledge from facts inferred after synchronizing a reasoner, then queries the inferred graph with SPARQL.

• How you’d use it — Install with pip install yamlpyowl, author an .owl.yml file, and load it with yamlpyowl.OntologyManager(path). Use the manager’s name-mapping container and underlying owlready2 ontology to access entities and relations, call sync_reasoner(infer_property_values=True) for inference, issue SPARQL via make_query, or use the installed yamlpyowl CLI to convert YAML to RDF/XML. Python 3.8+ and Java are required.

• LLM angle — none stated

• Pitfalls & lessons — Ordinary documentation does not yet exist, and the authors describe yamlpyowl as an early prototype likely to be expanded and changed. The README also says owlready2 and most OWL reasoners do not support metaclasses/punning, motivating the optional proxy-individual workaround.

• Verdict — A documented prototype for human-readable YAML ontology authoring that bridges into owlready2 reasoning, SPARQL inspection, and standard RDF/XML export.

Sources consulted

• README.md
• doc/demo_notebooks/zebra_puzzle.ipynb