Lode

Live Owl Documentation Enviroment (LODE) is an open source service that automatically extracts entities from semantic artefacts (OWL, RDF/RDFS, SKOS) and renders them, together with their textual definitions, as a human-readable HTML page designed for browsing and navigation through embedded links. This new reengineered version of LODE is maintained by OpenCitations.

Try it online: a hosted instance of the web service is available at https://lode.opencitations.net/, with no installation needed.

Installation

pip install oc-lode

# with the web service (`lode serve`)
pip install "oc-lode[server]"

Usage

# Build static documentation from an ontology URL or a local file
lode build --url <url> --read-as <owl|rdf|skos> [--out ./docs] [--lang en] [--artefact-name index] [--imported] [--closure]
lode build --file <path> --read-as <owl|rdf|skos> [--out ./docs]

# Run the web service locally (requires the [server] extra)
lode serve --port 8000

Documentation

Full documentation is available at: https://opencitations.github.io/lode/

Prerequisites

This project uses UV for dependency management.

Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/opencitations/lode.git

# Enter the repo
cd lode

# Install dependencies
uv sync --all-extras --dev

# run locally
uv run python main.py

# open at 
localhost:8000

Docker

Build

docker build -t lode .

Run

docker run -p 8080:8080 lode

Run from Docker Hub

docker run -p 8080:8080 opencitations/lode:latest

Replace latest with the desired version tag.

The app will be available at localhost:8080.

Running tests

uv run pytest tests/

How to cite

If you use LODE, please cite both the paper and the software:

Pasqual, V., Nazari, A., Peroni, S. (2026). Supporting the understanding of ontologies for scientific knowledge graphs with the new version of LODE. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment (Sci-K 2026), co-located with the 25th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2026, Bari, Italy, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 4291, pp. 12–26. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4291/paper1.pdf

@inproceedings{pasqual2026lode,
  author    = {Pasqual, Valentina and Nazari, Ahmadreza and Peroni, Silvio},
  title     = {Supporting the Understanding of Ontologies for Scientific Knowledge Graphs with the New Version of LODE},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment (Sci-K 2026), co-located with the 25th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2026, Bari, Italy},
  series    = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume    = {4291},
  pages     = {12--26},
  publisher = {CEUR-WS.org},
  issn      = {1613-0073},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4291/paper1.pdf}
}

To cite the software (all versions), use this BibTeX entry:

@software{lode,
  author    = {Pasqual, Valentina and Peroni, Silvio and Nazari, Ahmadreza},
  title     = {LODE - Live OWL Documentation Environment},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.21805185},
  url       = {https://github.com/opencitations/lode}
}

License

This project is licensed under the ISC License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.