Re: Question on SHACL resources

Some responses below, marked as FS.

 

Von: Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
Datum: Dienstag, 16. November 2021 um 04:06
An: <public-shacl@w3.org>
Betreff: Re: Question on SHACL resources
Neu gesendet von: <public-shacl@w3.org>
Neu gesendet am: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 03:06:10 +0000

 

On 2021-11-13 9:10 pm, Sasaki, Felix wrote:

Hi all,

 

I see more and more industry interest in SHACL. To foster adoption, I am wondering where to find resources, e.g.:

 
SHACL shapes for widely used standard vocabularies e.g. mentioned at https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov
Which of those would you like to see covered in particular? FS: DCAT, Provenance, SKOS & SKOS-XL, foaf. 

I notice that the Dublin Core vocabs are rather vague and consist mostly of properties only, making them hard to capture as SHACL. We do have a reasonably complete coverage of SKOS and SKOS-XL in our product workspace, and many other SHACL ontologies in production. But as most users of this technology, these versions are not published on regular "Linked Data" URLs. In our practice as vendor we are aware of many projects that use SHACL, yet they typically remain in private ontologies, for dedicated enterprise-specific tasks.

FS: I understand (also from experience) that in enterprise one may adapt shapes to specific needs. But conversations about internal adoption often start with a question: can you show me shapes for well-known vocabularies that are relevant for our use case? Cataloging, provenance tracking, taxonomy management and person relationship mgmt. are common use cases, so having such vocabularies with off-the shelf shapes would be very helpful in the above mentioned conversations. It would also help IMO to foster tool support. I am coming from an XML background, and there are many XML vocabularies (DITA, DocBook, …) that have standard schemas. That helped to set user expectations and to also to foster dedicated UI development. It can also help as an argument inside enterprises for avoiding the invention of a new, internal vocabulary.

A notable exception is https://datashapes.org/schema which is a SHACL copy of schema.org

It would be a great initiative to start pulling such vocabularies together into a consistent publicly maintained repo, but such a project would need a dedicated leader. We have converters from OWL/RDFS to SHACL that may help quickly populate such a repo.

FS: yes, inded, such a project would need a leader. Disclaimer: I am not stepping up 😊  I know from experience that community building does not happen on its own, and may need at least some initial (financial etc.) support.
 
SHACL use cases with example shapes (the SHACL spec has a lot of examples, but these are grouped by feature – it is sometimes hard to find the right feature for a given need)
There is space for a SHACL book and more tutorials, for sure. We did publish some at https://www.topquadrant.com/technology/shacl/

 
Various types of tooling, esp. editors
TopBraid EDG covers SHACL, but that's a commercial tool.

 
 

This list is very helpful to ask technical questions about SHACL. Where should I go to find “the community” that could help to gather (and extend) information as above?

This mailing list here is quite OK I think. As usual, much discussion also happens on other channels such as Twitter. A general Slack or Gitter channel would be cool if anyone here is willing to set this up?

In general, yes we do see a lot of uptake of SHACL too, but much more "community" should arise. We at TopQuadrant can only do so much alone...

FS: thanks a lot for all the pointers. I joined the TopBraid users list, which has a lot of useful discussions, also about shacl. 
Felix
Holger

 

 

Thanks a lot for any pointers in advance,

 

Felix