Another Excel-to-RDF converter for SKOS vocabs, but one that:
-
uses fixed templates to keep it simple
-
meets particular SKOS profile outcomes (VocPub)
-
is under active development, production use, and is commercially supported
An online version of VocExcel is available at https://tools.dev.kurrawong.ai/vocexcel.
The process to create an RDF vocabulary from an Excel template is:
-
Fill in a copy of an Excel template
-
Process it
-
Using one of the options, and export an RDF file
-
You can choose to validate the RDF produced while processing
-
The template files in this repository’s templates/ folder are to be used to create vocabularies. The templates hopefully contain all the information needed to understand how to fill them in.
Use one Excel workbook per vocabulary.
-
templates/VocExcel-template-071.xlsx
Unless you have a good reason to do something different, please use the latest version of the template.
Older templates still convert, so if you’ve used one and like it, keep using it.
To process an Excel template, you will need to either:
-
run the VocExcel Python script, or
-
use an online tool
-
for example https://tools.dev.kurrawong.ai/vocexcel
-
The Python script can also run as a Python module, i.e. within a larger Python workflow.
You will need to:
-
have Python installed on your computer
-
3.10+ required
-
-
install the required packages in your main Python environment or a virtual environment
-
you can use the Poetry tool with the pyproject.toml file to install required Python packages
-
The Python script convert.py in the vocexcel/ directory can be run on Windows/Unix/Linux/Mac systems like this:
~$ python convert.py some-excel-file.xlsx
for example, using one of the test data files:
~$ python convert.py ../tests/data/070_long.xlsx
The command line argument options can be found by typing:
~$ python convert.py -h
They are:
usage: vocexcel [-h] [-i] [-l] [-v] [-p PROFILE] [-o OUTPUTFILE] [-f {turtle,xml,json-ld}] [-s SHEET] [-t TEMPLATEFILE] [-e ERRORLEVEL] [-m MESSAGELEVEL] [-g LOGFILE] [file_to_convert]
positional arguments:
file_to_convert The Excel file to convert to a SKOS vocabulary in RDF or an RDF file to convert to an Excel file (default: None)
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-i, --info The version and other info of this instance of VocExcel. (default: False)
-l, --listprofiles This flag, if set, must be the only flag supplied. It will cause the program to list all the vocabulary profiles that this converter, indicating both their URI and their short token for use with
the -p (--profile) flag when converting Excel files (default: False)
-v, --validate Validate output file (default: False)
-p PROFILE, --profile PROFILE
A profile - a specified information model - for a vocabulary. This tool understands several profiles andyou can choose which one you want to convert the Excel file according to. The list of
profiles - URIs and their corresponding tokens - supported by VocExcel, can be found by running the program with the flag -lp or --listprofiles. (default: vocpub)
-o OUTPUTFILE, --outputfile OUTPUTFILE
An optionally-provided output file path. If not provided, output is to standard out. (default: None)
-f {turtle,xml,json-ld,graph}, --outputformat {turtle,xml,json-ld,graph}
An optionally-provided output format for RDF outputs. 'graph' returns the in-memory graph object, not serialized RDF. (default: turtle)
-s SHEET, --sheet SHEET
The sheet within the target Excel Workbook to process (default: vocabulary)
-t TEMPLATEFILE, --templatefile TEMPLATEFILE
An optionally-provided Excel-template file to be used in SKOS-> Excel converion. (default: None)
-e ERRORLEVEL, --errorlevel ERRORLEVEL
The minimum severity level which fails validation (default: 1)
-m MESSAGELEVEL, --messagelevel MESSAGELEVEL
The minimum severity level printed to console (default: 1)
-g LOGFILE, --logfile LOGFILE
The file to write logging output to (default: None)
The convert.py file uses the function excel_to_rdf() to do conversions, so you can directly run that function in other Python programs by importing convert.py, like this:
from vocexcel import convert
from pathlib import Path
convert.rdf_to_excel(Path(".") / "path" / "to" / "vocab-file.xlsx")
KurrawongAI maintains an online VocExcel tool at https://vocexcel.dev.kurrawong.ai
This repository also contains code to run your own online converter, see the [Vue.js] application in the vocexcel-ui/ folder and the Python application server in the vocexcel/wbe/ folder.
This code is licensed using the BSD 3-Clause. See the LICENSE for the deed. Note that Excel is property of Microsoft.
Commercial support:
http://docs.kurrawong.ai/vocexcel
info@kurrawong.ai
Lead Developer:
Nicholas Car
Data System Architect
KurrawongAI
nick@kurrawong.ai