Welcome to nanopub’s documentation!

The nanopub library provides a high-level, user-friendly python interface for searching, publishing and retracting nanopublications.

Nanopublications are a formalized and machine-readable way of communicating the smallest possible units of publishable information. See What are nanopublications? for more information.

Setup

Install using pip:

pip install nanopub

To publish to the nanopub server you need to setup your profile. This allows the nanopub server to identify you. Run the following interactive command:

setup_nanopub_profile

This will add and store RSA keys to sign your nanopublications, publish a nanopublication with your name and ORCID iD to declare that you are using using these RSA keys, and store your ORCID iD to automatically add as author to the provenance of any nanopublication you will publish using this library.

Quick Start

Publishing nanopublications

import rdflib
from nanopub import Publication, NanopubClient

# Create the client (we use use_test_server=True to point to the test server)
client = NanopubClient(use_test_server=True)

# Either quickly publish a statement to the server
client.claim('All cats are gray')

# Or: 1. construct a desired assertion (a graph of RDF triples) using rdflib
my_assertion = rdflib.Graph()
my_assertion.add((rdflib.URIRef('www.example.org/timbernerslee'),
                  rdflib.RDF.type,
                  rdflib.FOAF.Person))

# 2. Make a Publication object with this assertion
publication = Publication.from_assertion(assertion_rdf=my_assertion)

# 3. Publish the Publication object. The URI at which it is published is returned.
publication_info = client.publish(publication)
print(publication_info)

Searching for nanopublications

from nanopub import NanopubClient

# Create the client
client = NanopubClient()

# Search for all nanopublications containing the text 'fair'
results = client.find_nanopubs_with_text('fair')
for result in results:
    print(result)

Fetching nanopublications and inspecting them

from nanopub import NanopubClient

# Create the client
client = NanopubClient()

# Fetch the nanopublication at the specified URI
publication = client.fetch('http://purl.org/np/RApJG4fwj0szOMBMiYGmYvd5MCtRle6VbwkMJUb1SxxDM')

# Print the RDF contents of the nanopublication
print(publication)

# Iterate through all triples in the assertion graph
for s, p, o in publication.assertion:
    print(s, p, o)