SEMIC Style Guide RDF Validator

This project comprises a Python test suite and configuration resources for a Java service, for validating OWL vocabularies and SHACL shapes, according to the SEMIC conventions for semantic data interoperability, as part of the interoperability test bed (ITB).

The use case is geared towards validating an OWL ontology (rather than its instance data) like ePO and/or a SHACL Shapes file (which itself typically validates instance data) to ensure comformance to applicable SEMIC rules.

ITB SEMIC SHACL Validator

This service allows you to assess the conformance of an OWL model (ontology) or a SHaCL Shapes file with the SEMIC Style Guide. For each guideline in the style guide, a set of rules have been implemented, which assess whether an OWL or SHACL convention is respected. These rules specify constraints on the structure, relationships, and properties within the models. The set of rules employed during validation is documented here.

The content to validate can be provided as a file or a URI reference. Documentation on using the Interoperability Test Bed (ITB) is available here.

Useful Links

• REST API

SEMIC Conformance Test Suite for OWL and ShaCL

Aside from the examples/ folder, which is provided for user convenience, only the resources/ folder is specific to the ITB validator.

The single SEMIC shapes file resources/shapes/semic-shapes.ttl for ITB is automatically generated from multiple modular SHACL files (with the extension .shacl.ttl) under the toplevel shapes/ folder, which are used by the Python unit test files in test/.

Support for aggregating data, running a validation command, and testing a local ITB validator service instance via Docker are also provided (see Makefile, validation_runner.py and docker-compose.yml respectively).

Environment

The unit testing component is a Python 3.8+ project. You may want to create a local virtual environment to set up and run anything in it:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Run deactivate to exit out of this environment at any time.

Your Python programming IDE of choice should also have a way to select this as the "interpreter runtime".

You may also use any other means to run Python programs, such as a system-installed interpreter, the pyenv tool, or the conda tool (via a distribution like Anaconda).

Installation

Install the prerequisite software/library dependencies via the Python package manager Pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

You may want/have to run python -m pip install --upgrade to upgrade Pip itself, so that you have up-to-date dependency resolution.

Alternatively, a convenience Makefile is provided through which you can simply run make (which defaults to running make install), if you have the tool.

Usage

Run the test suite from the toplevel/root of the project folder:

pytest # or make test

For generating the complete ShaCL shapes file aggregated from the individual test shapes, a convenience Make target is provided:

make generate_aggregate_shapes

This generates the ShACL shapes file in output/semic-shacl.ttl (a version of which is committed in resources/shapes).

Alternatively, if you do not have make, inspect the Makefile and run the relevant commands yourself.