[shexTest] Pull Request: Make the ShEx vocabulary and ShExR's renderings derived, and keep them in sync

ericprud has just submitted a new pull request for https://github.com/shexSpec/shexTest:

== Make the ShEx vocabulary and ShExR's renderings derived, and keep them in sync ==
Six commits. The theme is that several files here were copies of each other maintained by hand, and they had drifted; this makes each one derived from a single source and adds checks to `npm test` so they cannot drift again.

### `vocab/` — the source of `http://www.w3.org/ns/shex`

`shex.ttl`, `shex.jsonld` and `shex.html` at w3.org/ns are generated from a `vocab.csv` by a script Gregg Kellogg (RIP) wrote for the purpose. That source had been sitting in the long-dormant [shexspec.github.io](https://github.com/shexSpec/shexspec.github.io/tree/master/ns) repo. It now lives in `vocab/`, ported from Ruby to dependency-free Node and verified to reproduce the Ruby's output byte-for-byte before any change was made.

It lands in this repo because this repo already carried two hand-maintained copies of that vocabulary, and both had drifted:

- **`doc/ShExJ-context.jsonld`** was the `@context` of `shex.jsonld`, copied. All 70 keys matched exactly; it was missing only `shex:extends`. It is now generated (`npm run vocab`).
- **`doc/ShExR.shex`** ran *ahead* of the published vocabulary, using `sx:ShapeDecl`, `sx:abstract`, `sx:imports` — none of which had ever been published — and `sx:negated`.

`npm run vocab-check` reports terms ShExR uses that the vocabulary does not define, and is part of `npm test`.

The vocabulary side of this is [w3c/ns#38](https://github.com/w3c/ns/pull/38), which adds those three terms plus the shape-map terms.

### `sx:negated` removed

`negated` was the ShEx 2.0 draft's `!` operator on TripleConstraint. It was removed from the language in November 2016 — `224c610` here, `d3f882d` in spec — over the semantics problem in shexSpec/shex#11, and replaced by `{0,0}` cardinality and `ShapeNot`. Seven weeks later `fe51e15` ("~ aligned with ShExJ.jsg") copied it back into `doc/ShExR.shex` from the grammar, which had not been cleaned up yet. `e01f012` ("`TripleConstraint -= negated:BOOL`") dropped it from `doc/ShExJ.jsg` in 2020 but left ShExR alone, so the RDF rendering kept a term the JSON rendering had deleted.

It was never in the published namespace, is not in the spec, and the ShExC parser has no `!` rule — nothing could produce it. Gone from `ShExR.{shex,ttl,json,ntriples}`, plus `doc/ShExV.jsg` and the `schemas/meta.ttl` `sameAbstractSyntaxAs` line referencing two fixtures deleted in 2016. shexSpec/spec#(companion PR) and shex.js `489a1a75` cover the copies elsewhere.

### `bin/mkShExR.js` — ShExR's RDF renderings are now derived

`doc/ShExR.shex` is the hand-maintained source; the other three files in `doc/` are the same schema in other syntaxes, hand-synced on the honour system. **`doc/ShExR.ntriples` was last regenerated in 2017** (`7a7da0d`) — 800 triples against ShExR.shex's 1341, predating `ShapeDecl`, `abstract`, `imports` and `extends` entirely.

`bin/mkShExR.js` parses ShExR.shex to ShExJ and expands it through `doc/ShExJ-context.jsonld`, since ShExJ + that context *is* ShExR. So this also exercises the context, which is generated from `vocab/vocab.csv` — the vocabulary and the schema-of-schemas are now chained together.

- `ShExR.ttl` and `.ntriples` are regenerated and byte-compared by CI (`npm run shexr-check`).
- `ShExR.json` is compared as an AST rather than regenerated, so its hand formatting survives. It was already exactly what ShExR.shex parses to.
- **No content changed in `ShExR.ttl`** — canonicalising the previously committed file yields the regenerated one exactly. That diff is formatting; the `.ntriples` diff is nine years of catch-up.

The Turtle is pretty-printed rather than handed to `N3.Writer`, which labels every blank node and spells out all 265 `rdf:first`/`rdf:rest` triples. The ShExR graph is a tree, so blank nodes nest as `[ ]` and lists collapse to `( )`. Subject order comes from the rendered name, never a blank node label, so output does not depend on which parser produced the quads; the printer is idempotent.

### `doc/syntax-deltas.html`

Records where ShExC, ShExJ and ShExR disagree, found while doing the above, with links into the ShExC productions and both grammars here. The substantive one: ShExR's `sx:start @<#shapeDeclOrExpr>` admits a `ShapeDecl` at `start`, which `ShExJ.jsg` rejects and no ShExC production denotes — verified against all three. ShExR has no choice, since RDF cannot distinguish reference from containment, and it cannot even be narrowed to IRIs because `shapeDeclLabel` admits `BNODE`.

### Checks

`npm test` passes. `test-ts` remains broken independently of this PR — it shells out to `bin/makeTsTests.sh` and calls a bare `tsc` with no typescript devDependency; it is excluded from CI for that reason and unchanged here.

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

See https://github.com/shexSpec/shexTest/pull/73


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Received on Thursday, 6 August 2026 18:33:44 UTC