Validating RDF data: ShEx and SHACL compared

Date: Nov 30, 2018

Speaker: Jose Emilio Labra Gayo

Abstract

Although the benefits of RDF for data representation and integration are indisputable, it has not been embraced by everyday programmers and software architects who care about safely creating and accessing well-structured data. Semantic web projects still lack some common tools and methodologies that are available in more conventional settings to describe and validate their data. Two technologies have recently been proposed for RDF validation: Shape Expressions (ShEx) and Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). ShEx was designed as an intuitive and human-friendly high level language for RDF validation in 2014 and is being actively developed by the W3C ShEx community group. SHACL, proposed by the Data Shapes Working Group, was accepted as a W3C Recommendation in July 2017. In the talk, we will provide short introductions to both ShEx and SHACL using examples, provide a comparison between both and discuss some ideas for future work and applications related with RDF validation.

Bio

PhD. Jose Emilio Labra Gayo, Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain. He is the main researcher of the WESO research group and was a member of the RDF Data Shapes working group. He is co-author of the “Validating RDF data” book (http://book.validatingrdf.com), implemented the Shaclex library which supports both ShEx and SHACL, and maintains the online RDF validation service RDFShape (http://rdfshape.weso.es).

Presentation: Slides are available here.

References

• Materials of the “Validating RDF data” tutorial that Jose gave at ISWC 2018: http://www.validatingrdf.com/tutorial/iswc2018/