Semantic knowledge governance with SHACL and ontologies.
⚪ Concept · Scale & Twins cluster · Part of Vela Tools
FORNAX is an idea — a concept-stage Vela Tool that hasn't started development yet. This repository exists to gather demand signals, use cases, and feedback from the community before any code is written.
If this tool would solve a problem you have, vote and share your use case at velacontext.com/vela-tools. Tools with the most demand get built next.
At scale, an NGSI-LD platform becomes a knowledge graph — and like any knowledge graph, it accumulates inconsistencies. Entities that violate their schema, relationships that don't make ontological sense, attributes that drift from their official units. Smart Data Models help, but enforcing them across hundreds of entity types and millions of records needs governance.
FORNAX would be the semantic governance layer: SHACL-based shape validation, ontology consistency checks, units-of-measure enforcement, and graph-level integrity reports. The "linter" for your context data.
- SHACL validation — Industry-standard shape constraints, applied at scale.
- Ontology consistency — Catch relationships that don't make semantic sense.
- Integrity reports — Graph-level health checks for production knowledge graphs.
Data architects, semantic web practitioners, governance officers in mature deployments.
⚪ Concept stage. No development yet.
This repository serves as the official home for the concept — README, license placeholder, and issue tracking are live. Source code, documentation, and releases follow only after demand justifies development.
To prioritize this tool above others in the Vela Tools roadmap, vote on the product page or share your use case.
→ Vote and share use case: velacontext.com/vela-tools → Email: info@velacontext.com — subject "FORNAX Use Case"
If built, FORNAX would integrate with the rest of the Vela suite as follows:
| For this | Use this |
|---|---|
| Semantic governance and SHACL validation | FORNAX |
| Schema registry feeding shapes and constraints | LYNX |
| Real-time context API | a Context Broker (protected by LIBRA) |
| Compliance evidence proving governance | NORMA |
| Anomaly detection on integrity drift | CENTAURUS |
When (and if) FORNAX is built, it will follow the same open-core model as other Vela Tools:
| Edition | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| FOSS | Free, self-hosted, EUPL v1.2 | This repository (post-development) |
| Pro | Commercial license — advanced features, priority support, SLA | velacontext.com |
| Hub | Fully managed as part of Vela Context Data Hub | velacontext.com |
Final feature splits between FOSS and Pro will be announced ahead of development start.
In the concept stage, the most valuable contribution is demand signal:
- Vote for this tool at velacontext.com/vela-tools
- Share your use case — what would you build with FORNAX?
- Suggest improvements to the concept — open a feature request
When development begins, see CONTRIBUTING.md for the full code contribution process. All contributions will require a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) sign-off (git commit -s).
- Issues: GitHub Issues — for concept feedback and use case discussions
- Discussions: GitHub Discussions
- Newsletter: velacontext.com/newsletter — get notified when development begins
- General contact: info@velacontext.com
- Security: security@velacontext.com (see SECURITY.md)
When built, FORNAX FOSS edition will be licensed under the European Union Public Licence v1.2 (EUPL-1.2) — an OSI-approved, EU-developed open-source license available in 23 EU languages.
FORNAX is part of Vela Tools — open-core infrastructure for the NGSI-LD ecosystem, built by SenLab d.o.o. in Ljubljana, Slovenia 🇸🇮.
Learn more at velacontext.com.