shacl-vue (alpha)

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App design ​

The big picture ​

A pertinent goal of shacl-vue is to make scientific datasets interoperable with the wider ecosystem of linked and machine-actionable metadata, in other words: the semantic web. Linked data, RDF, ontologies, graphs, triples, semantic metadata, the list goes on. These terms might be ubiquitous in the world wide web, but are comparatively underexplored in the world of scientific data.

One linked-data tool, the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), provides a means to validate RDF graphs against a set of specified conditions. It is essentially a schema language for RDF data. By building a tool that can interpret and repurpose these conditions, you end up with an app that could render schema-based data entry forms, or data viewers, automatically. This is what shacl-vue aims to be. And also, free and open source, of course.

The toolset ​

shacl-vue is programmed with VueJS 3, and uses Vuetify UI components and Vite for the build process.

Under the hood, shacl-vue uses libraries compatible with the RDF/JS specifications for reading, manipulating, storing, and writing RDF data (including SHACL), in particular RDF-Ext.

The main concept ​

INFO

Currently, only the form generation part (editor) of shacl-vue is functional, and not yet the data rendering part (viewer)

shacl-vue was heavily inspired by the WC3 Draft: Form Generation using SHACL and DASH.

The idea is that if enough details are included in the node shapes and/or property shapes of a SHACL graph (as SHACL-native terms or as additional annotations), these details can feed the form generation process in order to create a user friendly data entry experience. Details like:

  • in which order should fields be displayed in a form?
  • can certain fields be grouped together physically in the form if they belong together thematically?
  • what is the human-readable name of a field with an otherwise obscure identifier?
  • does a field have a clarifying description that would help readers understand its importance or relevance?
  • what type of data format does the field require the user to enter? a date, or a sentence, or a link to another resource?
  • is there a minimum or maximum amount of values that a field can have?

With standard knowledge about such details in a SHACL graph, a knowledgeable application can act on this machine-readable information to create user-friendly interfaces rather than flat and uninterpretable forms. The W3C Draft provides a framework for interpreting such properties in a SHACL graph, and specifically provided comceptual Editor and Viewer components which would be automatically selected by the application based on the interpreted SHACL details. shacl-vue extends this into an implementation.

Since the incoming schema is in an RDF-compatible language, and the entered data are all captured as RDF, one could view a form generated by shacl-vue as a type of graph editor, but rather one that hides the complexity of graph data from the user by emulating the more standard hierarchical representation of a form that users would typically expect.