SHACL4P: SHACL constraints validation within Protégé ontology editor

Abstract

Recently, Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) have been introduced and adopted to address the problem of enterprise data integration (e.g., to solve the problem of terms and concepts heterogeneity within large organizations). One of the challenges of adopting SWT for enterprise data integration is to provide the means to define and validate structural constraints over Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. This is difficult since RDF graph axioms behave like implications instead of structural constraints. SWT researchers and practitioners have proposed several solutions to address this challenge (e.g., SPIN and Shape Expression). However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them provide an integrated solution within open source ontology editors (e.g., Protégé). We identified this absence of the integrated solution and developed SHACL4P, a Protégé plugin for defining and validating Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), the upcoming W3C standard for constraint validation within Protégé ontology editor.