A Framework to Include and Exploit Probabilistic Information in SHACL Validation Reports

Rémi Felin (1) , Catherine Faron (2, 3, 1) , Andrea G. B. Tettamanzi (1)

1 WIMMICS - Web-Instrumented Man-Machine Interactions, Communities and Semantics
2 UCA - Université Côte d'Azur
3 I3S - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis

The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) is a W3C recommendation which allows to represent constraints in RDF-shape graphs-, and validate RDF data graphs against these constraints. A SHACL validator produces a validation report whose result is false for a shape graph as soon as there is at least one node in the RDF data graph that does not conform to the shape. This Boolean result of the validation of an RDF data graph against an RDF shape graph is not suitable for discovering new high-potential shapes from the RDF data. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework to accept shapes with a realistic proportion of nodes in an RDF data graph that does not conform to it. Based on this framework, we propose an extension of the SHACL validation report to express a set of metrics including the generality and likelihood of shapes and we define a method to test a shape as a hypothesis test. Finally, we present the results of experiments conducted to validate a test RDF data graph against a set of shapes.

Keywords: RDF; SHACL; Shape Testing; Data Validation; Probabilistic Assessment

Domains: Computer Science [cs]

Rémi Felin, Catherine Faron, Andrea G. B. Tettamanzi. A Framework to Include and Exploit Probabilistic Information in SHACL Validation Reports. ESWC 2023 - 20th International European Semantic Web Conference, May 2023, Hersonissos, Greece. ⟨hal-04031744⟩