Workflow for interpreting linked data in .ttl files with Python RDFLib

Question

I am using turtle files containing biographical information for historical research. Those files are provided by a major library and most of the information in the files is not explicit. While people's professions, for instance, are sometimes stated alongside links to the library's URIs, I only have URIs in the majority of cases. This is why I will need to retrieve the information behind them at some point in my workflow, and I would appreciate some advice.

I want to use Python's RDFLib for parsing the .ttl files. What is your recommended workflow? Should I read the prefixes I am interested in first, then store the results in .txt (?) and then write a script to retrieve the actual information from the web, replacing the URIs?

I have also seen that there are ways to convert RDFs directly to CSV, but although CSV is nice to work with, I would get a lot of unwanted "background noise" by simply converting all the data.

What would you recommend?

Answer 1

RDFlib's all about working with RDF data. If you have RDF data, my suggestion is to do as much RDF-native stuff that you can and then only export to CSV if you want to do something like print tabular results or load into Pandas DataFrames. Of course there are always more than one way to do things, so you could manipulate data in CSV, but RDF, by design, has far more information in it than a CSV file can so when you're manipulating RDF data, you have more things to get hold of.

most of the information in the files is not explicit

Better phrased: most of the information is indicated with objects identified by URIs, not given as literal values.

I want to use Python's RDFLib for parsing the .ttl files. What is your recommended workflow? Should I read the prefixes I am interested in first, then store the results in .txt (?) and then write a script to retrieve the actual information from the web, replacing the URIs?

No! You should store the ttl files you can get and then you may indeed retrieve all the other data referred to by URI but, presumably, that data is also in RDF form so you should download it into the same graph you loaded the initial ttl files in to and then you can have the full graph with links and literal values it it as your disposal to manipulate with SPARQL queries.