Using Ontology Terms

SBOL leans heavily on a variety of ontologies for terminology. Examples include PROV-O for provenance terms, and Ontology of units of Measure for defining and using measures and units. The most commonly used terms are defined as pySBOL3 constants. These only scratch the surface of what is available.

TYTO is a Python module that automates the lookup of ontology terms so that you do not have to remember long, sometimes meaningless URIs. Here is an example of ontology lookup using TYTO:

>>> import tyto
RDFLib Version: 5.0.0
>>> tyto.SO.promoter
'https://identifiers.org/SO:0000167'
>>> tyto.SBO.systems_biology_representation
'https://identifiers.org/SBO:0000000'

TYTO and pySBOL3 will happily coexist and work together. TYTO can be used to look up some of the same terms that pySBOL3 defines as constants. For example:

>>> import sbol3
RDFLib Version: 5.0.0
>>> import tyto
>>> sbol3.SBO_DNA == tyto.SBO.deoxyribonucleic_acid
True
>>> sbol3.SBO_RNA == tyto.SBO.ribonucleic_acid
True
>>> sbol3.SO_PROMOTER == tyto.SO.promoter
True

TYTO Installation

TYTO can be installed using pip, Python’s package installer.

pip install tyto