A Review of SHACL: From Data Validation to Schema Reasoning for RDF Graphs

Abstract

We present an introduction and a review of Shapes Constraint Language (shacl), the W3C recommendation language for validating rdf data. A shacl document describes a set of constraints on rdf nodes, and a graph is valid with respect to the document if its nodes satisfy these constraints. We revisit the basic concepts of the language, its constructs and components and their interaction. We review the different formal frameworks used to study this language and the different semantics proposed. We examine a number of related problems, from containment and satisfiability to the interaction of shacl with inference rules, and exhibit how different modellings of the language are useful for different problems. We also cover practical aspects of shacl, discussing its implementations and state of adoption, to present a holistic review useful to practitioners and theoreticians alike.

Construction of a base ontology to represent accident expertise knowledge

“…For this purpose, the W3C community developed constraints languages such as SHApe Constraint Language (SHACL) or the Shape Expression (ShEx), which allows RDF data validations. Significantly, these languages and SHACL, in particular, do not only enhance RDF graph understanding, but they also help to detect problems on data graphs and therefore provide guarantees for better interoperability [49]. In this paper, we used SHACL as a language to build validation graphs since it offers basic inference and the possibility of supporting open-world assumptions (OWA) over its counterpart ShEx [50].…”