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A Review of SHACL: from data validation to schema reasoning for RDF graphs

A Review of SHACL: from data validation to schema reasoning for RDF graphs
A Review of SHACL: from data validation to schema reasoning for RDF graphs
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.
115-144
Pareti, Paolo
c4337eaa-f206-4639-afd2-3bcbfe734cdb
Konstantinidis, George
f174fb99-8434-4485-a7e4-bee0fef39b42
Pareti, Paolo
c4337eaa-f206-4639-afd2-3bcbfe734cdb
Konstantinidis, George
f174fb99-8434-4485-a7e4-bee0fef39b42

Pareti, Paolo and Konstantinidis, George (2021) A Review of SHACL: from data validation to schema reasoning for RDF graphs. In, Reasoning Web. Declarative Artificial Intelligence. pp. 115-144. (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-95481-9_6).

Record type: Book Section

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.

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Published date: 8 September 2021

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 504293
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/504293
PURE UUID: 845bfa0a-36ba-4289-a663-f9eba067e362
ORCID for Paolo Pareti: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2502-0011

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Date deposited: 02 Sep 2025 17:11
Last modified: 10 Sep 2025 09:25

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Contributors

Author: Paolo Pareti ORCID iD
Author: George Konstantinidis

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