Information

  • The RDF Data Shapes Working Group was closed on 15 October 2018.

RDF Data Shapes Working Group - Publications

Recommendations

- history

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.

Notes

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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.

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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.

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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.

Retired specifications