SHACL Constraints with Inference Rules

TL;DR

This paper explores how SHACL constraints interact with datalog inference rules, proposing a method to detect and update constraints to account for inferred facts in RDF graphs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to integrate SHACL constraints with datalog inference rules, enabling schema updates based on inferred data.

Findings

The method can detect potential SHACL constraint violations after inference.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the approach.

Theoretical analysis supports the correctness of the schema update process.

Abstract

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.