SHACL-based Ontology Design Patterns for Data Compliance Validation.

Abstract

This research proposes a Semantic Web Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) for data compliance validation based on SHACL constraints. Our proposed pattern helps data owners to validate data compliance in terms of legal requirements, technicality, data quality and business rules. We evaluate the compliance pattern, both for guiding and for blocking violations, by an illustrative scenario on the No Wrong Door principle of a Flemish municipality’s Open Data portal. For this evaluation, we create an OWL ontology containing SHACL constraints from both types of violations. This research is specifically using constraint-based reasoning for validating the guiding and blocking compliance violations and reporting on them and allows answering the central research question as to how, where and to what extent SHACL can identify, prevent, and remediate data compliance violations. This research concludes with the results and discussion and reflects on how well the compliance pattern can be applied in other or broader domains.

Date of Award	28 Apr 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Bastiaan Heeren (Examiner) & Lloyd Rutledge (Co-assessor)