A quick-reference visualization of SHACL's class hierarchy

[ajnelson-nist]

I wrote a quick visualization in GraphViz¹ that takes all of SHACL's current classes, their occurrences in rdfs:subClassOf triples, and lays out the class hierarchy. I don't know if there would be desire to turn this into a feature of the documentation, but I think it would be helpful for our reference as we lay out where properties' domains and ranges are, and find possible opportunities for refinement.

I'm leaving this as an open Discussion because I don't see it as a closable Issue unless there's sufficient appetite to get this as a continuous-integrated resource---which would necessitate integrating some Turtle parsing tool.

This figure was generated against the state as of this commit. Arrows represent "X is-subclass-of Y", spelled with the proper-subset symbol (⊂). I didn't put any thought into whether subset-or-equal (⊆) should go anywhere.

Footnotes

1. Disclaimer: Participation by NIST in the creation of the documentation of mentioned software is not intended to imply a recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor is it intended to imply that any specific software is necessarily the best available for the purpose. ↩

[HolgerKnublauch]

My first reaction is that it's a bit too busy. It would be better split by topics, e.g. all SPARQL-related or SHACL-AF features shouldn't be in the same diagram as the shape classes.

[ajnelson-nist]

Agreed. I just initially wanted everything in the same SVG so I could text-search for classes.

[TallTed]

This is a great thing. GraphViz appears to have improved significantly since the last time I played with it!

Also splitting it into sub-graphs (so, retaining the all-in-one) could help overall comprehension, and make it help with visual debugging of the class structure.