Skip to main content

pronto Stars

A Python frontend to ontologies.

Actions License Source Docs Coverage Sanity PyPI Bioconda Versions Wheel Changelog GitHub issues DOI Downloads

🚩 Table of Contents

🗺️ Overview

Pronto is a Python library to parse, browse, create, and export ontologies, supporting several ontology languages and formats. It implement the specifications of the Open Biomedical Ontologies 1.4 in the form of an safe high-level interface. If you're only interested in parsing OBO or OBO Graphs document, you may wish to consider fastobo instead.

🏳️ Supported Languages

🔧 Installing

Installing with pip is the easiest:

# pip install pronto          # if you have the admin rights
$ pip install pronto --user   # install it in a user-site directory

There is also a conda recipe in the bioconda channel:

$ conda install -c bioconda pronto

Finally, a development version can be installed from GitHub using setuptools, provided you have the right dependencies installed already:

$ git clone https://github.com/althonos/pronto
$ cd pronto
# python setup.py install

💡 Examples

If you're only reading ontologies, you'll only use the Ontology class, which is the main entry point.

>>> from pronto import Ontology

It can be instantiated from a path to an ontology in one of the supported formats, even if the file is compressed:

>>> go = Ontology("tests/data/go.obo.gz")

Loading a file from a persistent URL is also supported, although you may also want to use the Ontology.from_obo_library method if you're using persistent URLs a lot:

>>> cl = Ontology("http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/cl.obo")
>>> stato = Ontology.from_obo_library("stato.owl")

🏷️ Get a term by accession

Ontology objects can be used as mappings to access any entity they contain from their identifier in compact form:

>>> cl['CL:0002116']
Term('CL:0002116', name='B220-low CD38-positive unswitched memory B cell')

Note that when loading an OWL ontology, URIs will be compacted to CURIEs whenever possible:

>>> aeo = Ontology.from_obo_library("aeo.owl")
>>> aeo["AEO:0000078"]
Term('AEO:0000078', name='lumen of tube')

🖊️ Create a new term from scratch

We can load an ontology, and edit it locally. Here, we add a new protein class to the Protein Ontology.

>>> pr = Ontology.from_obo_library("pr.obo")
>>> brh = ms.create_term("PR:XXXXXXXX")
>>> brh.name = "Bacteriorhodopsin"
>>> brh.superclasses().add(pr["PR:000001094"])  # is a rhodopsin-like G-protein
>>> brh.disjoint_from.add(pr["PR:000036194"])   # disjoint from eukaryotic proteins

✏️ Convert an OWL ontology to OBO format

The Ontology.dump method can be used to serialize an ontology to any of the supported formats (currently OBO and OBO JSON):

>>> edam = Ontology("http://edamontology.org/EDAM.owl")
>>> with open("edam.obo", "wb") as f:
...     edam.dump(f, format="obo")

🌿 Find ontology terms without subclasses

The terms method of Ontology instances can be used to iterate over all the terms in the ontology (including the ones that are imported). We can then use the is_leaf method of Term objects to check is the term is a leaf in the class inclusion graph.

>>> ms = Ontology("ms.obo")
>>> for term in ms.terms():
...     if term.is_leaf():
...         print(term.id)
MS:0000000
MS:1000001
...

🤫 Silence warnings

pronto is explicit about the parts of the code that are doing non-standard assumptions, or missing capabilities to handle certain constructs. It does so by raising warnings with the warnings module, which can get quite verbose.

If you are fine with the inconsistencies, you can manually disable warning reports in your consumer code with the filterwarnings function:

import warnings
import pronto
warnings.filterwarnings("ignore", category=pronto.warnings.ProntoWarning)

📖 API Reference

A complete API reference can be found in the online documentation, or directly from the command line using pydoc:

$ pydoc pronto.Ontology

📜 License

This library is provided under the open-source MIT license. Please cite this library if you are using it in a scientific context using the following DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.595572

Release files for pronto 2.7.3

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for pronto 2.7.3
File Size Uploaded
pronto-2.7.3.tar.gz 63.1 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for pronto 2.7.3
File Interpreter ABI Platform
pronto-2.7.3-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 125.2 kB

Release files / pronto-2.7.3.tar.gz

Download URL pronto-2.7.3.tar.gz
Size 63.1 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
101effc2cc5de4269d0754e10c3c574181b8e5ba8cc615dea530b61a8cbd5046
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
c2fdb23ce2421f966fce762817ec2a7636b5b47c8020d1f97a210d9aadf9fcd6
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
Yes
Uploaded via twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.7

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

PyPI Publish Attestation

PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.

Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Jan 12, 2026.

Transparency log

Release files / pronto-2.7.3-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL pronto-2.7.3-py3-none-any.whl
Size 62.1 kB
Tags Python 3
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
c7e225a39ddaca2771e46d6b3511ae851d1440b6a96e455aa7eb2bbbb459b8be
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
0da03d7ca89585aba18945168c58dc2705caa2516488e274c3327a6b0932c0a0
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
Yes
Uploaded via twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.7

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

PyPI Publish Attestation

PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.

Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Jan 12, 2026.

Transparency log

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

2.7.3 This release

2 release files

2.7.2

2 release files

2.7.1

2 release files

2.7.0

2 release files

2.6.0

2 release files

2.5.8

2 release files

2.5.7

2 release files

2.5.6

2 release files

2.5.5

2 release files

2.5.4

2 release files

2.5.3

2 release files

2.5.2

2 release files

2.5.1

2 release files

2.5.0

2 release files

2.4.7

2 release files

2.4.6

2 release files

2.4.5

2 release files

2.4.4

2 release files

2.4.3

2 release files

2.4.2

2 release files

2.4.1

2 release files

2.4.0

2 release files

2.3.2

2 release files

2.3.1

2 release files

2.3.0

2 release files

2.2.4

2 release files

2.2.3

2 release files

2.2.2

2 release files

2.2.1

2 release files

2.2.0

2 release files

2.1.0

2 release files

2.0.1

2 release files

2.0.0

2 release files

1.2.0

2 release files

1.1.5

2 release files

1.1.4

2 release files

1.1.3

2 release files

1.1.2

2 release files

1.1.1

2 release files

1.1.0

2 release files

1.0.0

2 release files

0.12.2

2 release files

0.12.1

2 release files

0.12.0

2 release files

0.11.1

2 release files

0.10.2

2 release files

0.10.1

2 release files

0.10.0

2 release files

0.9.0

2 release files

0.8.0

4 release files

0.7.4

2 release files

0.7.3

2 release files

0.7.2

2 release files

0.7.1

2 release files

0.7.0

2 release files

0.6.2

3 release files

0.6.1

4 release files

0.6.0

2 release files

0.5.0

2 release files

0.4.2

2 release files

0.4.1

2 release files

0.4.0

2 release files

0.3.3

2 release files

0.3.2

3 release files

0.3.1

3 release files

0.3.0

3 release files

0.2.1

3 release files

0.2.0

2 release files

0.1.12

2 release files

0.1.11

1 release file

0.1.10

2 release files

0.1.9

2 release files

0.1.7

2 release files

0.1.6

2 release files

0.1.5

1 release file

0.1.4

2 release files

0.1.3

2 release files

0.1.2

2 release files

0.1.1

3 release files

0.1.0

1 release file

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page