SHACL: The Shape of Things to Come

When Enterprise architects and developers are first exposed to the W3C standards in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) space, they are perplexed by the Open World Assumption. Enterprises mostly deal with closed worlds where everything is validated and known. The Open World seems loose, ill-structured and impossible to deal with. The confusion is understandable but largely comes from different goals: Open integration and inference versus accurate, definitive, and complete.

The W3C RDF Shapes Working Group is presently working on a language for validating an RDF graph against a set of conditions. The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) will be a useful tool to achieve many of the Closed World goals of validation, code generation and more. This talk will introduce the SHACL language and how it can help make RDF more acceptable to Enterprise uses.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He is a system architect, a developer, a mentor, and a trainer. Brian has been speaking about REST, the Semantic Web, and other technologies around the world as part of conferences such as NoFluffJustStuff, JavaOne, Jazoon, the Spring Experience, the Rich Web Experience, and Museums on the Web. Brian has written for DevX's Semantic Web Zone, JavaWorld, and has contributed chapters to O'Reilly Media's "Beautiful Architecture" and "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know." He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in northern California. He consults and speaks frequently about next generation technologies around the world.