A Review of SHACL: From Data Validation to Schema Reasoning for RDF Graphs
This is an incremental review paper that synthesizes existing knowledge on SHACL to aid researchers and practitioners in understanding its applications and challenges in data validation and schema reasoning for RDF graphs.
The paper reviews the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), a W3C recommendation for validating RDF data, covering its concepts, formal frameworks, semantics, related problems, and practical implementations to provide a holistic overview for both practitioners and theoreticians.
We present an introduction and a review of the 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.