W3C today published the final report of the Workshop on RDF Validation: Practical Assurances for Quality RDF Data that was held 10-11 September 2013 in Cambridge.

The goal of the Workshop was to identify use cases, requirements, and candidate technologies to address the need for interface definition and validation for RDF documents and messages. The 20 presentations focused on current and future requirements and solutions. Discussion sessions focused on consensus-building around scope and next steps.

This workshop laid the groundwork for W3C to develop a human and machine-readable description of the “shape” of the RDF graphs that a service produces or consumes. This description should be usable for validation, form-generation, as well as human-readable documentation. The participants further agreed that the solution must provide a declarative way of describing simple integrity constraints along with an extension mechanism that allows using technologies such as SPARQL to specify more complex constraints.