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arXiv:2108.06096cs.LO

SHACL: A Description Logic in Disguise

Bart Bogaerts, Maxime Jakubowski, Jan Van den Bussche

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Abstract

SHACL is a W3C-proposed language for expressing structural constraints on RDF graphs. In recent years, SHACL's popularity has risen quickly. This rise in popularity comes with questions related to its place in the semantic web, particularly about its relation to OWL (the de facto standard for expressing ontological information on the web) and description logics (which form the formal foundations of OWL). We answer these questions by arguing that SHACL is in fact a description logic. On the one hand, our answer is surprisingly simple, some might even say obvious. But, on the hand, our answer is also controversial. By resolving this issue once and for all, we establish the field of description logics as the solid formal foundations of SHACL.

arXiv comments
Presented at LPNRM conference 2022
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LOLogic in Computer Science

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Linked by 1 identifiable commenter in 2 comments across 2 threads, from Aug 2022 to Oct 2025. Found in 1 HN submission from Jun 2022 to Jun 2022. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments2 threads

  1. Microformats – building blocks for data-rich web pages 1 comment

    • > People always mention RDF when the semantic web comes up. There's nothing wrong with RDF itself, the modern plain-text and JSON serializations are very simple and elegant. Even things like OWL are being reworked now with efforts like SHACL and ShEx (see e.g.…

      zozbot234View on HNParent context

  2. The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web 1 comment

    • A recent paper connects SHACL (mentioned in OP) to description logic and OWL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06096 . This is a surprising link which seems to have been missed by SemWeb practitioners when SHACL was proposed.

      zozbot234View on HNParent context

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