Statement of Support for SHACL from Allotrope Foundation

Allotrope Foundation is an international association of pharmaceutical and biotech companies dedicated to the building of a “Laboratory Framework” to improve efficiency in data acquisition, long term preservation and management.  As an integral part of this effort, Allotrope Foundation has created the Allotrope Foundation Ontology (AFO), an OWL based ontology, the purpose of which is to ensure the consistent and accurate capture of language in the data and associated metadata, represented as an RDF graph.

Considering the numerous permutations and combinations of data sources, at the instrument and software level and from different organizations, there is a challenge in ensuring consistent creation of these data.  After researching this problem for over a year by means of both paper exercises and working-code proof-of-concepts based on real world use-cases, Allotrope Foundation has made the following technical decisions:



1)      Allotrope needs a data model (to ensure consistency in the captured data)

2)      Allotrope needs to be able to systematically and programmatically check for consistency of this captured data

3)      SHACL has been selected as the standard by which Allotrope will instantiate these data models

4)      Allotrope is committed to establishing a generalized validation service for RDF graphs based on SHACL constraints

This Allotrope functionality is anticipated to be available as 2017 draws to a close.

Based on this, Allotrope Foundation encourages the W3C consortium to support the SHACL standard as it has been developed by the SHACL committee.

Sincerely,
James Vergis
Allotrope Foundation Secretariat


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James M. Vergis, Ph.D.
Science Advisor
Allotrope Foundation Secretariat
Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP
http://www.allotrope.org<http://www.allotrope.org/>
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