rdf-validate-shacl

Validate RDF data purely in JavaScript. An implementation of the W3C SHACL specification on top of the RDFJS stack.

We provide a SHACL playground based on this library.

Usage

The library only handles SHACL validation and not data loading/parsing. The following example uses rdf-utils-fs for this purpose. For more information about handling RDF data in JavaScript, check out Get started with RDF in JavaScript.

The validation function returns a ValidationReport object that can be used to inspect conformance and results. The ValidationReport also has a .dataset property, which provides the report as RDF data.

import rdf from '@zazuko/env-node'
import SHACLValidator from 'rdf-validate-shacl'

async function main() {
  const shapes = await rdf.dataset().import(rdf.fromFile('my-shapes.ttl'))
  const data = await rdf.dataset().import(rdf.fromFile('my-data.ttl'))

  const validator = new SHACLValidator(shapes, { factory: rdf })
  const report = await validator.validate(data)

  // Check conformance: `true` or `false`
  console.log(report.conforms)

  for (const result of report.results) {
    // See https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/#results-validation-result for details
    // about each property
    console.log(result.message)
    console.log(result.path)
    console.log(result.focusNode)
    console.log(result.severity)
    console.log(result.sourceConstraintComponent)
    console.log(result.sourceShape)
  }

  // Validation report as RDF dataset
  console.log(await report.dataset.serialize({ format: 'text/n3' }))
}

main();

Validator options

The SHACLValidator constructor accepts an optional options object as second parameter. The available options are:

Parameter	type
factory	DatasetFactory
maxErrors	number	max number of errors after which the validation process should stop. By default, it only stops after all the errors are found.
allowNamedNodeInList	boolean	SHACL only allows blank nodes in property lists. To allow named nodes to occur in property lists, set this value to true.
importGraph	(url: NamedNode) => DatasetCore | Promise<DatasetCore>	function to load imported shape graphs.
constraintVocabularies	Array<({ factory: DataFactory }) => Quad[]>	quad factories returning additional vocabulary graphs with SHACL constraints, such as DASH
constraintValidators	Record<string, Validator>	custom constraint validators to override or extend the default ones. See Custom constraints for more details.

Custom constraints

You can add custom constraints to the validator by providing a constraintValidators and constraintVocabularies. The latter can be skipped if you only intend to override existing constraints.

In a module with validators, export objects which implement the Validator interface.

// dash-validators.js
import type { Validator } from 'rdf-validate-shacl';

export const singleLine: Validator = {
    component: rdf.ns.dash.SingleLineConstraintComponent,
    validate(context, focusNode, valueNode, constraint) {
        return !valueNode.value.includes('\n')
    }
}

Then, you can import the validators and pass them to the SHACLValidator constructor. To use DASH, import the module @vocabulary/dash.

import SHACLValidator from 'rdf-validate-shacl'
import { DatasetCore } from '@rdfjs/types'
import dash from '@vocabulary/dash'
import * as constraintValidators from './dash-validators.js'

let shapes: DatasetCore
const validator = new SHACLValidator(shapes, {
    constraintVocabularies: [dash],
    constraintValidators,
})

Running the tests

$ npm test

Limitations

rdf-validate-shacl does not support SHACL-SPARQL constraints

About

rdf-validate-shacl was originally a fork of shacl-js meant to make it compatible with RDF/JS libraries. Since then, we dropped support for the SHACL-JS extension and adapted the API to suit our needs.