Re: Validating Schemas

JSON-LD, Turtle, RDF/XML, etc. are all different alternative text serialization formats for RDF.  Is this what you meant by “alternative representation of RDF”?

SHACL does not validate at the level of “is this a valid RDF serialization”. It validates at the level “does this RDF data have the expected shape”.

I believe pretty much any RDF-based software already has the ability to successfully serialize and de-serialize standard text formats and report an error if the format is incorrect. 

> On Mar 26, 2020, at 2:43 PM, James Hudson <jameshudson3010@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Yes, I understand that. A json-ld document is an alternate representation of RDF.
> 
> Regards,
> James
> `
> 
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 2:35 PM Irene Polikoff <irene@topquadrant.com <mailto:irene@topquadrant.com>> wrote:
> Hello James,
> 
> SHACL validates RDF. It does not validate text serializations of RDF to make sure that a serialized document/file itself is a syntactically valid sterilization of RDF. 
> 
> So, I would think that first you'd need to have a document that is a valid serialization of RDF i.e., it can be successfully parsed and de-serialized. Then, you could use SHACL to ensure that RDF data corresponds to the SHACL shapes that describe it. I am using “RDF data” loosely, meaning any set of RDF triples, whether it is data or schema does not matter. By schema I mean the model of the data - classes, properties, allowed values for properties.
> 
>> On Mar 26, 2020, at 1:33 PM, James Hudson <jameshudson3010@gmail.com <mailto:jameshudson3010@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> Being rather new to the linked data world, I am at the point where I need to work out the best methods for validating schema's and the role that SHACL may or may not be able to play.
>> 
>> Since it is easier to discuss something real, I have created a sample schema in the json-ld format and have made it available here:
>> 
>> https://gist.github.com/James-Hudson3010/7deec4df32aa6b97509aeb490f1edf9b <https://gist.github.com/James-Hudson3010/7deec4df32aa6b97509aeb490f1edf9b>
>> 
>> It can be entered into the json-ld playground and visualized without error.
>> 
>> What I mean by validation of the schema, is that I would like to make sure it is valid json-ld document. I have not typed "@Ib" instead of "@id". That there is a "@id" key for every object. Additionally, that when I have declared something as a subclass, that the superclass exists and there are no typos in the superclass name.
>> 
>> Perhaps someone has already been working on to playing with shape files for json-ld schema's.
>> 
>> Perhaps I am ascribing capabilities to SHACL that it does not have.
>> 
>> Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
>> 
>> Additionally, for completeness, I have created an instance based on this schema and that can be found here:
>> 
>> https://gist.github.com/James-Hudson3010/227ffb77b853a29556be5b5c3a67c309 <https://gist.github.com/James-Hudson3010/227ffb77b853a29556be5b5c3a67c309>
>> 
>> Regards,
>> James
>