Abstract
Linked Data has forged new ground in developing easy-to-use, distributed databases. The prevalence of this data has enabled a new genre of social and scientific applications. At the same time, Semantic Web technology has failed to significantly displace SQL or XML in industrial applications, in part because it offers no equivalent schema publication and enforcement mechanisms to ensure data consistency. The RDF community has recognized the need for a formal mechanism to publish verifiable assertions about the structure and content of RDF Graphs, RDF Datasets and related resources. We propose a formal model that could serve as a foundation for describing the various types invariants, pre- and post-conditions for RDF datasets and then demonstrate how the model can be used to analyze selected example constraints.
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Notes
- 1.
RESTful implementations will want to minimize preconditions that prevent the operation from being idempotent. An \(add\) operation that states the triples cannot be present or a \(remove\) operation that states that the triples must exist would have to be implemented as an http POST operation rather than a PUT.
- 2.
While this information is undoubtedly available in the Protégé documentation, the current description is derived from the authors’ experience with the editor itself and, as such, may be incomplete or inaccurate. We see this as another example where a formal specification for graph invariants would prove useful.
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Solbrig, H., Prud’hommeaux, E., Chute, C.G., Davies, J. (2014). A Formal Model for RDF Dataset Constraints. In: Kim, W., Ding, Y., Kim, HG. (eds) Semantic Technology. JIST 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8388. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06826-8_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06826-8_19
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