This group serves to promote and expand ShEx – Shape Expressions. ShEx is a grammar for RDF graphs which can be used for description, validation, parsing and transformation.
The Shape Expressions (ShEx) language describes RDF nodes and graph structures. A node constraint describes an RDF node (IRI, blank node or literal) and a shape describes the triples touching nodes in RDF graphs. These descriptions identify predicates and their associated cardinalities and datatypes. ShEx shapes can be used to communicate data structures associated with some process or interface, generate or validate data, or drive user interfaces.
Spec at https://shexspec.github.io/spec/
shexSpec
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| Date | Name |
|---|---|
| ShapeMap Structure and Language | |
| Shape Expressions Language 2.0 | |
| Shape Expressions (ShEx) Primer |
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Congratulations to Katherine Thornton et al for winning Best Paper in the In-Use track at ESWC 2019 for “Using Shape Expressions (ShEx) to Share RDF Data Models and to Guide Curation with Rigorous Validation”(announcement tweet, awards page).
The ShEx Community Group is excited by the recent announcement that Wikidata’s support for ShEx has moved from testing to deployment. This will increase its existing use for facilitating consensus around domain models as a basis for quality assurance. “In the spirit of Wikidata not restricting the world,” explains Léa Lacroix of Wikidata, “Shape Expressions are a tool to highlight, not prevent, errors.”
Using a new Wikidata extension, ShEx schemas (such as the schema for disease) are stored in ShEx compact syntax on wiki pages and linked to a tool for checking selected data. Next in the development pipeline will be a tool for suggesting a basic structure when new Wikidata items are added.
Links:
The ShEx Community Group would like to invite public review of three deliverables:
The test suite has a Implementation Report including 4 of the 5 implementations: http://shexspec.github.io/shexTest/reports
For feature requests please note the features in the 2.1 milestone: https://github.com/shexSpec/shex/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3A2.1
Many of these have been implemented and tested but are not in this version of the specification. We invite feedback from the community on issues with the documents or tests, new feature prioritization and new feature use cases.
Comments are welcome on the ShEx Community Group mailing list (archived): public-shex@w3.org
Readers may also wish to join the ShEx Community Group: https://www.w3.org/community/shex/join
Sincerely,
The group is using GitHub for managing the specification, issues and the test-suite.
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Katherine Thornton
