DCAT-AP SHACL constraint definitions

The Application Profiles (AP) offered here represent a set of integrity constraints used to check the physical and logical correctness or rationality of a certain dataset. The SHACL specifications for DCAT Application Profile.

The rules of thumb page offers insights into how the shapes were created.

The Source Structure

• ./shacl folder contains the latest version of the official DCAT-AP shacl expression
• ./resources folder contains the latest version of the controlled vocabularies required by dcat-ap-mdr-vocabularies.shapes.rdf. Note that in order to validate for controlled vocabularies, all of them need to be loaded as part of the data graph.
• ./test folder contsins rdf unit tests that can be executed with Free version of TopBraid Composer. Currently they offer partial coverage for DCAT-AP and more unit tests shall be created from real data.
• ./dev folder contains experiemntal in progress work or other sources. For example shapeview.ui.ttlx can be used to generate the DCAT-AP HTML documentation from its SHACL implementation.
• ./documentation folder contains the static HTML generated automatically using the SWP technology. The source code for generating this document is in ./dev/shapeview.app

The scope of the current release

• dcat-ap.shapes.ttl validates instance shapes with respect to:

  • o cardinality constraints, both for properties that have a minimum occurrence greater or equal to than 1 (for example, there needs to be at least one occurrence of the mandatory property title of a Dataset) and properties that have an explicit maximum occurrence (for example, there can be a maximum of one licence for a Distribution)
  • o restrictions concerning ranges (expressed as sh:nodeKind) of properties to avoid that properties, irrespective of whether they are mandatory, recommended or optional, are provided that violate range declarations.

• dcat-ap-mandatory-classes.shapes.ttl validates that data includes the mandatory classes.

• dcat-ap-mdr-vocabularies.shapes.ttl validates that values of a property are taken from the mandatory controlled vocabularies

Usage Notes

To execute these shape files you can use shacl-cl tool build on top of TopQuadrant's implementation of SHACL API or any other implementation of the SHACL standard.