Deciding SHACL Shape Containment through Description Logics Reasoning (Extended Version)

Abstract

The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) allows for formalizing constraints over RDF data graphs. A shape groups a set of constraints that may be fulfilled by nodes in the RDF graph. We investigate the problem of containment between SHACL shapes. One shape is contained in a second shape if every graph node meeting the constraints of the first shape also meets the constraints of the second. To decide shape containment, we map SHACL shape graphs into description logic axioms such that shape containment can be answered by description logic reasoning. We identify several, increasingly tight syntactic restrictions of SHACL for which this approach becomes sound and complete.