Graph schema validation at last? Work towards a StemmaREST ontology with Neo4J, RDF-STAR, and SHACL
Tara Lee Andrews · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2025
Abstract As of 2023, there have been two intriguing developments in the Semantic Web world that are especially relevant to digital humanities projects that are anchored to graph technologies, such as the StemmaREST repository for variant text traditions. The first of these is RDF-STAR, an extension to RDF that allows an entire triple to be the subject or object in further triple statements. The second is Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), a language whose purpose Is to define a set of constraints against Ih RDF graphs can be validated. This language solves a problem that OWL never adequately addressed: a set of SHACL constraints can help ensure the consistency of data as it is created. This article reports on the results of a proof-of-concept implementation of a validation pipeline for StemmaREST graph data, through conversion to RDF-STAR, ontological enrichment to make superclass membership explicit, and validation with SHACL. Although there remain certain obstacles to putting this into practice for the case of StemmaREST, the proof of concept demonstrates that graph schema validation is a viable option for digital humanities projects in general.