An exploratory, personally maintained project investigating whether common SHACL validation designs can be made safer to reuse than copied shapes.
The name describes a catalogue of patterns: documented validation designs that may include executable modules, parameters, mappings, examples, and tests. A pattern is not necessarily a shapes graph that consumers should import unchanged.
This repository is pre-alpha and architectural. Nothing here is a standard, a universal best practice, or production-ready. Its ownership, governance, canonical namespace, and publication authority are deliberately undecided.
The current development namespace is https://w3id.org/shacl-pattern-catalogue/dev/ as a conspicuous placeholder only. It is not registered, promised, or suitable for external dependency. See IRI and namespace requirements.
Examples abbreviate that namespace as spc:. The repository name, vocabulary file, and development IRIs use the Australian spelling “catalogue”; “catalog” is an English-language search label only.
- shape authors adapting a proven constraint design to a local data model;
- profile maintainers assembling tested patterns into an application shapes graph;
- tool builders generating specialised shapes from abstract roles and mappings;
- reviewers comparing portability, performance, and semantic trade-offs;
- publishers exposing pattern metadata through ValPub-compatible profiles.
The primary reuse scenarios are selection and adaptation, deterministic assembly, and—only where explicitly declared safe—direct module import.
- Project charter
- Concept assessment and risks
- Architecture
- Pattern contract
- Testing and portability
- Experimental patterns
- Open questions
The repository separates catalogue vocabulary (ontology/), opt-in external vocabulary alignments (alignments/), pattern packages (patterns/), abstract-to-local mappings (mappings/), assembly tooling (tooling/), publication profiles (profiles/), cross-pattern examples (examples/), and repository-level tests (tests/). This layout is provisional and follows the architecture rather than defining it.
The work is offered under CC0 1.0 for maximally permissive reuse, subject to the separate disclaimer. Licence choice remains an architectural experiment and should be reviewed before a stable release.