Using Rule-Based Reasoning for RDF Validation

The success of the Semantic Web highly depends on its ingredients. If we want to fully realize the vision of a machine-readable Web, it is crucial that Linked Data are actually useful for machines consuming them. On this background it is not surprising that (Linked) Data validation is an ongoing research topic in the community. However, most approaches so far either do not consider reasoning, and thereby miss the chance of detecting implicit constraint violations, or they base themselves on a combination of different formalisms, e.g. Description Logics combined with SPARQL. In this paper, we propose using Rule-Based Web Logics for RDF validation focusing on the concepts needed to support the most common validation constraints, such as Scoped Negation As Failure (SNAF), and the predicates defined in the Rule Interchange Format (RIF). We prove the feasibility of the approach by providing an implementation in Notation3 Logic. As such, we show that rule logic can cover both validation and reasoning if it is expressive enough.