Deciding SHACL Shape Containment through Description Logics Reasoning (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to decide SHACL shape containment by translating SHACL constraints into description logic axioms, enabling reasoning-based verification of shape relationships in RDF graphs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to determine SHACL shape containment using description logic reasoning, including syntactic restrictions for soundness and completeness.

Findings

Mapping SHACL shapes into description logic allows for effective reasoning.

Identifies syntactic restrictions that ensure sound and complete containment decisions.

Provides a formal foundation for SHACL shape containment analysis.

Abstract

The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) allows for formalizing constraints over RDF data graphs. A shape groups a set of constraints that may be fulfilled by nodes in the RDF graph. We investigate the problem of containment between SHACL shapes. One shape is contained in a second shape if every graph node meeting the constraints of the first shape also meets the constraints of the second. To decide shape containment, we map SHACL shape graphs into description logic axioms such that shape containment can be answered by description logic reasoning. We identify several, increasingly tight syntactic restrictions of SHACL for which this approach becomes sound and complete.