The Many Shapes of SHACL

Speaker: Holger Knublauch

Date: June 2020

The Shapes Constraint Language SHACL is now a well-established W3C graph technology standard. While SHACL was originally designed to focus on constraint validation, the community is discovering a variety of other use cases that exploit SHACL's ability to describe the shape of valid RDF data. Instead of just verifying that existing data conforms to a set of constraints, SHACL can pro-actively help with the construction of valid new data, and to traverse and better make sense of graph structures. In this presentation we will look at recently implemented SHACL-based capabilities using the TopBraid platform as an example. Among others we show shape-driven user interfaces, using SHACL to describe GraphQL-based web service APIs and using SHACL schemas to drive various analytical algorithms.

Bio: Holger Knublauch is lead developer at TopQuadrant and original developer of the TopBraid product family. He has extensive hands-on experience with programming semantic technology tools, editors and algorithms. Holger also created various RDF-based languages including SPIN which later became one of the foundations of SHACL. He served as lead editor of the W3C SHACL standard. In a previous role as a Post-Doc at Stanford University, Holger helped develop one of the first editors for the OWL Web Ontology Language.