Inference

brickschema makes it easier to employ reasoning on your graphs. Simply call the expand method on the Graph object with one of the following profiles:

  • "rdfs": RDFS reasoning

  • "owlrl": OWL-RL reasoning (using 1 of 3 implementations below)

  • "vbis": add VBIS tags to Brick entities

  • "shacl": perform advanced SHACL reasoning

By default, expand will simplify the graph. Simplification is the process by which axiomatic, redundant or other “stray” triples are removed from the graph that may be added by a reasoner. This includes items like the following:

  • triples that assert an entity to be an instance of owl:Thing or owl:Nothing

  • triples that assert an entity to be a blank node

  • triples that assert an entity to be the same as itself

To turn simplification off, simply add simplify=False when calling expand.

from brickschema import Graph

g = Graph(load_brick=True)
g.load_file("test.ttl")
g.expand(profile="owlrl")
print(f"Inferred graph has {len(g)} triples")

Brickschema also supports inference “schedules”, where different inference regimes can be applied to a graph one after another. Specify a schedule by using + to join the profiles in the call to expand.

from brickschema import Graph

g = Graph(load_brick=True)
g.load_file("test.ttl")
# apply owlrl, shacl, vbis, then shacl again
g.expand(profile="owlrl+shacl+vbis+shacl")
print(f"Inferred graph has {len(g)} triples")

The package will automatically use the fastest available reasoning implementation for your system:

  • reasonable (fastest, Linux-only for now): pip install brickschema[reasonable]

  • Allegro (next-fastest, requires Docker): pip install brickschema[allegro]

  • OWLRL (default, native Python implementation): pip install brickschema

To use a specific reasoner, specify "reasonable", "allegrograph" or "owlrl" as the value for the backend argument to graph.expand.