Getting Ancestors and Descendants in Order

[Clair Kronk]

Hi! I'm having an amazing time using Owlready2 and it has been really helpful, but one issue I've run into recently is that I want to display a hierarchical view of the ontology (akin to the classes view in the NCBO BioPortal, see here for example: https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/MESH/?p=classes&conceptid=root).

In order to do that, I think I need to be able to load an ordered version of the ancestors and descendants of a given class, but the ".ancestors()" and ".descendants()" functions appear to be unordered. Is there a way to order them or is there a work-around for something like this?

Thanks so much!

[Jiba]

Hi,

There is no ordered ancestors in Owlready (although PyMedTermino has some, for UMLS terminologies).

You can order the ancestors / descendants using Python's sort() method:

ancestors = MyClass.ancestors()
ancestors.sort(key = lambda e: e.name)

You may want to sort by label, replacing e.name with e.label.first() .

Jiba