Data Shapes Working Group - Publications

Deliverers

Data Shapes Working Group

SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) is a language for describing and constraining the contents of RDF graphs. SHACL groups these descriptions and constraints into "shapes", which specify conditions that apply at a given RDF node. Shapes provide a high-level vocabulary to identify predicates and their associated cardinalities, datatypes and other constraints. Additional constraints can be associated with shapes using SPARQL and similar extension languages. These extension languages can also be used to define new high-level vocabulary terms. SHACL shapes can be used to communicate information about data structures associated with some process or interface, generate or validate data, or drive user interfaces. This document defines the SHACL language and its underlying semantics.

Deliverers

Data Shapes Working Group

To foster the development of Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) this document includes a set of use cases and requirements that motivate a simple language and semantics for formulating structural constraints on RDF graphs. All use cases provide realistic examples describing how people may use structural constraints to validate RDF instance data.

Deliverers

Data Shapes Working Group

This document describes advanced features of the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) including features to define custom targets, annotation properties, user-defined functions, node expressions and rules. While many of these features rely on SPARQL, they also define extension points that can be used by other implementation languages.

Deliverers

Data Shapes Working Group

This document defines a JavaScript-based extension mechanism for the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). It defines a syntax for declaring constraints, constraint components, functions, rules and targets in JavaScript. Using this syntax, SHACL shapes can benefit from the rich expressive power of JavaScript. In order to ensure that the resulting JavaScript code can be executed across platforms, this document defines a (minimalistic) JavaScript API that needs to be implemented by supporting engines.

Deliverers

Data Shapes Working Group

This document defines the Core of the SHACL Shapes Constraint Language. SHACL is a language for validating RDF graphs against a set of conditions. These conditions are provided as shapes and other constructs expressed in the form of an RDF graph. RDF graphs that are used in this manner are called "shapes graphs" in SHACL and the RDF graphs that are validated against a shapes graph are called "data graphs". As SHACL shape graphs are used to validate that data graphs satisfy a set of conditions they can also be viewed as a description of the data graphs that do satisfy these conditions. Such descriptions may be used for a variety of purposes beside validation, including user interface building, code generation and data integration.

Deliverers

Data Shapes Working Group

This document defines SPARQL-related extensions of the SHACL Shapes Constraint Language. SHACL is a language for validating RDF graphs against a set of conditions. These conditions are provided as shapes and other constructs expressed in the form of an RDF graph. While the Core part of SHACL defines the basic syntax of shapes and the most common constraint components supported by SHACL, the SPARQL-related extensions cover features that extend the expressiveness of Core by means of SPARQL. In particular, this document defines how constraints and constraint components can be defined using SPARQL.