WShEx: A language to describe and validate Wikibase entities

TL;DR

WShEx is a specialized language designed to describe and validate Wikibase entities directly, accommodating Wikidata's unique features beyond standard RDF serialization.

Contribution

The paper introduces WShEx, a new language inspired by ShEx, tailored to the Wikibase data model for improved entity validation and description.

Findings

WShEx supports Wikibase features like qualifiers and references.

It provides an abstract syntax and semantics for entity validation.

WShEx enhances schema expressiveness for Wikidata.

Abstract

Wikidata is one of the most successful Semantic Web projects. Its underlying Wikibase data model departs from RDF with the inclusion of several features like qualifiers and references, built-in datatypes, etc. Those features are serialized to RDF for content negotiation, RDF dumps and in the SPARQL endpoint. Wikidata adopted the entity schemas namespace using the ShEx language to describe and validate the RDF serialization of Wikidata entities. In this paper we propose WShEx, a language inspired by ShEx that directly supports the Wikibase data model and can be used to describe and validate Wikibase entities. The paper presents a the abstract syntax and semantic of the WShEx language.