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Challenges in RDF Validation

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Current Trends in Semantic Web Technologies: Theory and Practice

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 815))

Abstract

The RDF data model forms a cornerstone of the Semantic Web technology stack. Although there have been different proposals for RDF serialization syntaxes, the underlying simple data model enables great flexibility which allows it to be successfully employed in many different scenarios and to form the basis on which other technologies are developed. In order to apply an RDF-based approach in practice it is necessary to communicate the structure of the data that is being stored or represented. Data quality is of paramount importance for the acceptance of RDF as a data representation language and it must be enabled by the use of tools that can check if some data conforms to some specific structure. There have been several recent proposals for RDF validation languages like ShEx and SHACL. In this chapter, we describe both proposals and enumerate some challenges and trends that we foresee with regards to RDF validation. We devote more space to what we consider one of the main challenges, which is to compare ShEx and SHACL and to understand their underlying foundations. To that end, we propose an intermediate language and show how ShEx and SHACL can be converted to it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is also a special kind of literals that have an associated language tag. We omit them in this chapter to simplify the presentation.

  2. 2.

    RDFShape is deployed at: http://rdfshape.weso.es. The following link can be used to show that graph or dynamically visualize other RDF graphs: https://goo.gl/jgMPM4.

  3. 3.

    An exception is our Shaclex library [24] which also provides information about conformant nodes.

  4. 4.

    http://plantuml.com.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/ericprud/uml-model.

  6. 6.

    https://www.topquadrant.com/.

  7. 7.

    https://www.eclipse.org/lyo/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Society challenges: TIN2017-88877-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Jose Emilio Labra-Gayo, Herminio García-González, Daniel Fernández-Alvarez & Eric Prud’hommeaux

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  1. Jose Emilio Labra-Gayo
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  2. Herminio García-González
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  3. Daniel Fernández-Alvarez
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  4. Eric Prud’hommeaux
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Correspondence to Jose Emilio Labra-Gayo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Research and Postgraduate Studies, Tecnológico Nacional de México/I.T. Orizaba, Orizaba, Mexico

    Giner Alor-Hernández

  2. Division of Research and Postgraduate Studies, CONACYT-Instituto Tecnológico de Orizaba, Orizaba, Mexico

    José Luis Sánchez-Cervantes

  3. Centro de Tecnología Biomédica (CTB), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Pozuelo de Alarcon, Madrid, Spain

    Alejandro Rodríguez-González

  4. Facultad de Informática, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Rafael Valencia-García

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Labra-Gayo, J.E., García-González, H., Fernández-Alvarez, D., Prud’hommeaux, E. (2019). Challenges in RDF Validation. In: Alor-Hernández, G., Sánchez-Cervantes, J., Rodríguez-González, A., Valencia-García, R. (eds) Current Trends in Semantic Web Technologies: Theory and Practice. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 815. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06149-4_6

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