Modeling and Accessing Smart Materials with Integrity Constraints in the Shapes Constraint Language and Ontologies—The SmaDi Way

Various types of semantic artifacts play a vital role in developing software systems, for example, information systems for materials scientists that adhere to the findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability principles for digital assets. Among them, integrity constraints (ICs) are essential artifacts as they orthogonally add to the representation capabilities of ontologies a means to enforce consistency and completeness of given data. An IC language recommended by the worldwide web consortium (W3C) for use with linked open data is Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). This article discusses the algorithm and evaluation results for a new SHACL validator developed in the context of SmaDi, a project for digitalizing smart materials associated with MaterialDigital. The new validator reduces SHACL constraints to SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries, that is, queries in the W3C recommended query language over repositories represented in the standard syntax for linked open data, RDF. Hence, in contrast to off‐the‐shelf validators, it can be used with any SPARQL endpoint, even if there is only a (virtual) view of the RDF data. The article demonstrates the use of SHACL ICs for modeling some simple constraints over smart materials. The evaluation shows that our SHACL validator has processing times comparable to off‐the‐shelf SHACL validators.