SHACL Constraints with Inference Rules
This addresses a specific issue in Semantic Web technologies for researchers and practitioners working with RDF graphs and SHACL, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SHACL and datalog frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of SHACL constraints potentially being violated by new facts inferred from datalog rules, presenting a method to detect such violations and update the constraints accordingly, with theoretical and experimental results provided.
The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) has been recently introduced as a W3C recommendation to define constraints that can be validated against RDF graphs. Interactions of SHACL with other Semantic Web technologies, such as ontologies or reasoners, is a matter of ongoing research. In this paper we study the interaction of a subset of SHACL with inference rules expressed in datalog. On the one hand, SHACL constraints can be used to define a "schema" for graph datasets. On the other hand, inference rules can lead to the discovery of new facts that do not match the original schema. Given a set of SHACL constraints and a set of datalog rules, we present a method to detect which constraints could be violated by the application of the inference rules on some graph instance of the schema, and update the original schema, i.e, the set of SHACL constraints, in order to capture the new facts that can be inferred. We provide theoretical and experimental results of the various components of our approach.