Inferences Panel

The Inferences Panel lets you run SHACL rules (and, for the time being, SPIN rules). It will display all triples generated by the rules using a table with 3 columns: subject, predicate and object, or using Turtle source code.

Note

Rules defined using sh:values and sh:defaultValue are evaluated dynamically and will NOT be shown or executed by the panel.

Toolbar Buttons

  • Run inference rules: Executes all rules at least once.

  • Assert all inferred triples: This button will be activated only once you execute rules and they generate some statements that will be shown in the panel. Clicking on this button will write the inferred statements into the asset collection. Until you take this action, generated statements are not stored permanently. You may want to undo this from the Change History Panel before re-running the rules again. While you are experimenting, you could also assert them into a Workflow only.

  • Show/Select inference rules: This button opens a dialog that displays all available rules and lets you activate and deactivate them individually.

Settings

  • Execute all rules iteratively will repeatedly execute all rules until no further inferences were made. By default, the rules will only execute once. Active this if you have rules that depend on the output of other rules.

  • Include OWL RL Rules will automatically also include the rules defined in the SHACL-based OWL RL rules library bundled with TopBraid. You can find these rules in the file /TopBraid/SHACL/showlrl.ttl but you can add your own locally defined rules. This will execute all rules iteratively until no further inferences have been made. Furthermore, this will execute post-processing rules (from the file /TopBraid/SHACL/inferencepostprocessor.ttl) that will, among others, remove trivial OWL inferences such as ?s owl:sameAs ?s triples.

  • Display Source Code show the Turtle source code of the inferred triples instead of the table.

  • Display IDs instead of labels toggles between human-readable labels and qnames.

If you expect your rules to produce a large number of triple statements, we recommend that you run them using Transform > Execute Inference Rules. The role of Inferences panel is primarily to help you with testing rules as you develop them.

See Also

Further Reading on TopBraid