Seeking successful SHACL use cases

Hello,

Prof. Pieter Colpaert recommended turning to this list with my question.

I am preparing a presentation about SHACL to the FITKO, a public-law
institution in Germany that plays a major role in digitizing the public
administration. They are evaluating different options to embed validations
in their body of standardized data fields (https://fimportal.de) and are
interested to hear from our experience using SHACL at my startup
FörderFunke. We describe the eligibility rules for state benefits as SHACL
shapes ("law/rules as code") and use that to validate user profiles to tell
people what they are eligible for.

To build my presentation and in anticipation of questions they might have,
I would be grateful for your input on the following:

1. What are examples of SHACL being used in (big) production workloads?

2. Some say, SHACL (especially when SHACL-SPARQL is involved) is hard to
read/write for "newcomers" and there might be easier rule/validation
languages. Do you agree? Do you know of tools that make it easier or even
lets people create shapes without having to deal with the syntax at all?

3. In what ways have you seen SHACL being used? I presume, the "original"
and largest use case is validating large graph datasets? The way we are
using it at FörderFunke to evaluate someone's eligibility in the context of
state benefit means: starting from an empty profile with lots of
MinCountConstraintComponent results. One by one we ask the user those
missing data fields until only violating or conforming shapes are left. I
know of two other efforts that use SHACL in a similar way:
- Distributed Social Benefit Allocation using Reasoning over Personal Data
in Solid - IDLab at imec:
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3443/ESWC_2023_DMKG_paper_2204.pdf
- Using the Shapes Constraint Language for modelling regulatory
requirements - Veronika Heimsbakk (Capgemini), Kristian Torkelsen:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02723
If you heard of similar or other uses of SHACL, please let me know.

4. I would like to pitch it also as a solution to build and dynamically
adjust forms. We are experimenting with this by trying to
integrate "decision tree logic" into SHACL. Some of the new SHACL 1.2
features will help a lot here. Thanks to Thomas Bergwinkl's "experimental"
branch on shacl-engine, we can already conditionally set sh:deactivated
using Node Expressions. In that way we can say: "we are only interested in
this, if that other thing is the case". Have you seen use cases that use
shapes in this sort of conditional, dynamically adjusting way?

Thanks and best regards

*Benjamin Degenhart*
Co-Founder & Knowledge Engineer | FörderFunke

FörderFunke UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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