diffable-rdf

Deterministic, diff-stable serialization for rdflib graphs. Produces byte-identical Turtle across runs so version-controlled RDF artifacts (OWL ontologies, SHACL shapes, JSON-LD contexts) show minimal, meaningful diffs instead of blank-node churn.

Why

RDF serializers assign blank-node identifiers (_:c14nN, _:Nb1e2…) based on process-dependent ordering. Regenerating an ontology therefore produces large, spurious diffs even when nothing semantically changed. diffable-rdf fixes this with a standards-based pipeline:

  1. RDFC-1.0 (W3C RDF Dataset Canonicalization) via pyoxigraph — isomorphic inputs produce identical triple sets.
  2. Weisfeiler-Lehman structural hashing — replaces sequential _:c14nN identifiers with content-based hashes that depend only on graph structure, so adding/removing a triple only touches the directly involved blank nodes.
  3. Idiomatic rdflib re-serialization — inline blank nodes ([ … ]), collection syntax (( … )), and filtered prefixes (only prefixes actually used are declared).

All triples are preserved; only syntactic form changes.

Install

pip install diffable-rdf
# or
uv add diffable-rdf

Requires Python 3.10+, rdflib>=6, and pyoxigraph>=0.4.

Usage

from rdflib import Graph
from diffable_rdf import deterministic_turtle

g = Graph().parse("ontology.ttl")
ttl = deterministic_turtle(g)          # diff-stable, idiomatic Turtle
open("ontology.ttl", "w", newline="\n").write(ttl)

Other entry points:

from diffable_rdf import canonicalize_rdf_graph, deterministic_json, well_known_prefix_map

canonicalize_rdf_graph(graph, "turtle")   # lower-level RDFC-1.0 canonical form
deterministic_json(obj)                    # recursively key/list-sorted JSON(-LD)
well_known_prefix_map()                    # namespace IRI -> standard prefix name

API

Function Purpose
deterministic_turtle(graph) -> str Diff-stable, idiomatic Turtle (RDFC-1.0 + WL hashing + rdflib re-serialize).
canonicalize_rdf_graph(graph, output_format="turtle") -> str RDFC-1.0 canonical serialization (with rdflib fallback for non-standard RDF).
deterministic_json(obj, indent=3, preserve_list_order_keys=None) -> str Recursively sorted JSON; preserves JSON-LD ordered keys (@context, @list, …).
well_known_prefix_map() -> dict[str, str] rdflib's curated namespace→prefix bindings.

Provenance

Extracted from the diff-stabilization work in ASCS-eV/linkml#1 (itself a review-ready rework of upstream linkml/linkml#3295) into a small, tool-agnostic library so LinkML, ShapeChange output, and other RDF toolchains can share one canonicalizer.

License

Apache-2.0

Project links

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Credits

Author: ASCS e.V.

GitHub Statistics

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 5, 2026
The GitHub source repository was provided by the project maintainers and verified by PyPI at the time of upload. Stars, forks, and open issues/PRs are derived from that repository and have not been independently verified.

License expression

Apache-2.0
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Requires

Python >=3.10

Tags

canonicalization deterministic diff json-ld pyoxigraph rdf rdfc-1.0 rdflib serialization turtle

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