TIO-SHACL: Comprehensive SHACL validation for TMF Intent Ontologies

TL;DR

TIO-SHACL is a comprehensive validation framework using SHACL for the TMF Intent Ontology, enabling automated syntactic and semantic validation of network intents in telecommunications.

Contribution

It introduces the first complete SHACL validation framework for TMF Intent Ontology, covering all modules with reusable constraints and validation patterns.

Findings

Achieved 100% vocabulary coverage in validation.

Validated across three major SHACL engines with high accuracy.

Publicly available at https://github.com/EricssonResearch/tio-shacl.

Abstract

Intent-based networking promises to revolutionize telecommunications network management by enabling operators to specify high-level goals rather than low-level configurations. The TM Forum Intent Ontology (tio) provides a standardized vocabulary for expressing network intents, yet lacks formal validation mechanisms to ensure intent correctness before its admission. We present tio-shacl, the first comprehensive SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) validation framework for the TMF Intent Ontology. Our contribution includes 56 node shapes and 69 property shapes across all 15 tio v3.6.0 ontology modules, a reusable constraint library with 25 parameterized SPARQL-based constraint components, and novel validation patterns for recursive logical operators, quantity-based constraints, and cross-expectation relationships. We pursued 100% vocabulary coverage (87 classes, 109 properties, 72 functions), cross-implementation compatibility across three major SHACL engines, and validation accuracy on a corpus of 133 test cases. tio-shacl is publicly available under MIT license at https://github.com/EricssonResearch/tio-shacl and enables automated syntactic and semantic validation of network intents, addressing a critical gap in the field.