ShEx Schema Generator for RDF Graphs Created by Direct Mapping

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to automatically generate the description of an RDF graph structure. The description is expressed in Shape Expression Language (ShEx), which is developed by W3C and provides the syntax for describing the structure of RDF data. The RDF graphs to which this method can be applied are limited to those generated by the direct mapping, which is an algorithm for transforming relational data into RDF by W3C. A relational database consists of its schema including integrity constraints and its instance data. While the instance data can have been published in RDF by some standard methods such as the direct mapping, the translation of the schema has been missing so far. Unlike the users on relational databases, the ones on RDF datasets were forced to write repeated vague SPARQL queries over the datasets to acquire the exact results. This is because the schema for RDF data has not been provided to the users. The ShEx documents generated by our method can be referred as the schema on writing SPARQL queries. They also can validate data on RDF graph update operations with ShEx validators. In other words, they can work as the integrity constraints in relational databases.