SHACL-based data life cycle management

PoolParty Semantic Suite is Semantic Web Company’s platform for enterprise information integration based on Linked Data principles. PoolParty consists of several components that process and manage RDF based data sets. These components have consistency requirements towards the data they work on. Also, users have requirements towards the quality of the data they manage. We want to express constraints for both in a standard way throughout PoolParty components. SKOS-based PoolParty Thesaurus project data requires both consistency and quality. When processing data using pipelines in the UnifiedViews ETL component, checks can ensure consistency before and after the execution of pipeline steps. Validation therefore provides more stability when composing pipelines by ensuring conformance at each step. When editing general RDF data based on ontologies, we can use constraint validation to ensure conformance to ontology definitions based on restrictions. This closed world approach guides the user in modeling the ontology-based data while keeping consistency. For defining the constraints, we decided to use  the SHACL Shapes Constraint Language, a standard for validating RDF graphs against a set of conditions. These conditions are provided as shapes in the form of an RDF graph. This approach synergizes well with the requirement of PoolParty to have existing data of a specific form. These shapes can then be used for data validation and to provide a view on data consistency. They can also be easily integrated into other components for reuse and can be published as linked data. In this industry presentation we will demonstrate how PoolParty components can apply SHACL-based constraint validation to ensure data consistency. We will show use cases based on customer requirements where PoolParty is used to manage and process semantic data consistently and with controlled quality.