SHACL Validation under Graph Updates (Extended Paper)
This addresses the challenge of ensuring data integrity in evolving RDF graphs for users of semantic web technologies, representing an incremental advancement in SHACL validation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying whether RDF graphs that satisfy SHACL constraints will continue to do so after applying updates, by reducing static validation to constraint satisfiability using a regression technique. It analyzes computational complexity and presents a prototype implementation with preliminary experiments.
SHACL (SHApe Constraint Language) is a W3C standardized constraint language for RDF graphs. In this paper, we study SHACL validation in RDF graphs under updates. We present a SHACL-based update language that can capture intuitive and realistic modifications on RDF graphs and study the problem of static validation under such updates. This problem asks to verify whether every graph that validates a SHACL specification will still do so after applying a given update sequence. More importantly, it provides a basis for further services for reasoning about evolving RDF graphs. Using a regression technique that embeds the update actions into SHACL constraints, we show that static validation under updates can be reduced to (un)satisfiability of constraints in (a minor extension of) SHACL. We analyze the computational complexity of the static validation problem for SHACL and some key fragments. Finally, we present a prototype implementation that performs static validation and other static analysis tasks on SHACL constraints and demonstrate its behavior through preliminary experiments.