A Review of SHACL: From Data Validation to Schema Reasoning for RDF Graphs

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of SHACL, covering its language constructs, formal semantics, related problems, and practical adoption, serving as a valuable resource for both practitioners and researchers.

Contribution

It offers an in-depth analysis of SHACL's formal foundations, semantics, and practical implementations, highlighting its versatility and challenges in RDF data validation.

Findings

Multiple formal semantics for SHACL are analyzed.

SHACL's interaction with inference rules is explored.

Practical adoption and implementation status are discussed.

Abstract

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.