HERITRACE: a domain-agnostic framework for SHACL-driven RDF curation with provenance and change tracking

TL;DR

HERITRACE is a versatile, open-source web tool that simplifies RDF data curation with provenance tracking, using SHACL for domain-agnostic form generation and supporting easy deployment without data migration.

Contribution

It introduces a domain-agnostic framework for RDF curation that requires only SHACL shapes and YAML rules, with automatic provenance and change tracking.

Findings

Deployed in production for philological data curation.

Supports integration with existing SPARQL stores without data migration.

Publicly available on GitHub with Docker deployment options.

Abstract

HERITRACE is an open-source web application that enables users without Semantic Web expertise to curate RDF data through form-based interfaces with automatic provenance documentation and change tracking in RDF. It uses SHACL for data model definition and form generation, connects to existing SPARQL-accessible stores without data migration, and records every modification as a provenance snapshot that can be browsed and restored. HERITRACE is domain-agnostic: adapting it to a new collection requires only SHACL shapes and YAML display rules, without code changes. This paper describes the software architecture and provides the first empirical evaluation. HERITRACE is deployed in production for the ParaText project, where classical philologists curate bibliographic data about ancient Greek exegetical traditions, and is planned as the editing interface for OpenCitations and as the curation layer for the Social Sciences and Humanities Citation Index within the GRAPHIA Horizon Europe project. Since it operates on any SPARQL-accessible store without data migration, its adoption potential extends to any domain maintaining RDF data. HERITRACE is publicly available on GitHub under the ISC license, archived on Zenodo and Software Heritage Archive, and documented for deployment with a pre-built Docker image.