PurRDF

Developed as part of our work on neuro-symbolic engines, PurRDF provides the public, open-source foundations for representing, querying and reasoning over structured knowledge. It is designed to be useful independently of that work. PurRDF brings graph queries, logical reasoning, validation and retrieval into one coherent RDF 1.2 toolkit. Text search, spatial relationships and vector similarity can participate in the same query over the same dataset, without assembling a second database stack. Correctness includes knowing what an answer establishes. Reasoning produces reports of its completeness and limits; governed queries distinguish complete answers from partial results. The same Rust engine runs natively and in WebAssembly, with Python, JavaScript and C interfaces.

Version 1.0.0, released 2026-09-02, is the first release under full semantic versioning: from 1.0.0 a breaking change bumps the major version, a minor bump is additive, and a patch bump is bugfix-only. The suite ships one lockstep version across crates.io, PyPI, and npm through tag-driven Trusted Publishing, with build-provenance attestations and an SPDX SBOM on every package. The C ABI (purrdf.h) is versioned separately and remains 0.x.

What it provides

- An immutable, value-interned RDF 1.2 dataset model with triple terms, reifiers, and base-direction literals; a content-addressed pack container; and paged datasets with fallible views.
- Native codecs for Turtle, TriG, N-Triples, N-Quads, RDF/XML, TriX, HexTuples, JSON-LD (star), and YAML-LD, plus a JSON-LD 1.1 context lens and one RFC 3986 base-resolution layer shared by every codec and engine.
- W3C RDFC-1.0 dataset canonicalization, the purrdf-rdfc12 profile for RDF 1.2 constructs, and a review-friendly canonical Turtle rendering.
- A SPARQL 1.1/1.2 parser, algebra, and multiset evaluator with full Update, property paths, the VERSION declaration, LATERAL, SEP-0002 temporal arithmetic, SEP-0007 EXISTS semantics, SEP-0009 composite datatypes, caller-keyed extension seams, and governed execution with certified partial answers.
- Deterministic full-text search with exact fixed-point BM25 ranking, exact float-free GeoSPARQL 1.1, and embedding nearest-neighbour search over the PURREMB companion format, each answered from SPARQL in-process so an RDF project no longer needs a PostgreSQL instance beside its triple store.
- SHACL validation (Core, SHACL-SPARQL, and SHACL-AF including SHACL Rules), ShEx 2.1 validation, and schema lanes from SHACL to JSON Schema, OpenAPI, Pydantic, LinkML, TypeScript, and GraphQL.
- Entailment regimes (RDF, RDFS, OWL 2 RL, D, an OWL 2 Direct-Semantics tableau, and RIF-Core) that return a reasoning report with every closure, plus OWL 2 DL reasoning services with checkable certificates.
- Deterministic graph, tabular, and research-object projections, RDF 1.2 visualization, and the GTS single-file, content-addressed, append-only graph transport.

Behavior is gated by the W3C SPARQL, SHACL, shexTest, OWL 2, and RDFC-1.0 conformance suites and by frozen cross-language GTS vectors.

Publication Identity

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Field                               Value
  ----------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------------
  Title                               PurRDF: RDF 1.2 Toolkit

  DOI                                 10.67342/pkg8gpp4no/v1

  BII publication version             1

  Package version                     2.0.2

  Publication date                    2026-07-01

  Latest package release              2026-09-02

  Publisher                           Blackcat Informatics Inc.

  Source repository                   https://github.com/Blackcat-Informatics/purrdf

  Citation metadata                   https://blackcatinformatics.ca/purrdf/cite.csl.json

  License                             MIT OR Apache-2.0
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Distribution

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Runtime                    Package                       Install
  -------------------------- ----------------------------- ------------------------------------------
  Rust                       purrdf                        cargo add purrdf

  Python                     purrdf                        pip install purrdf

  JavaScript / WebAssembly   @blackcatinformatics/purrdf   npm i @blackcatinformatics/purrdf

  C                          libpurrdf                     make capi-build from the source checkout
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The canonical BII project/publication page is /purrdf/. Documentation lives in The PurRDF Book at https://blackcat-informatics.github.io/purrdf/ and the API reference at https://docs.rs/purrdf.