Remote Conformance Testing

In a sovereign dataspace ecosystem, reliable data exchange depends on strict adherence to shared semantic contracts. Alexandria provides Remote Conformance Testing as a core service, enabling participants, data providers, and connectors to validate data assets, dataset profiles, and Self-Descriptions against published vocabularies before publishing or transacting.

Why Remote Conformance Matters

When heterogeneous participants join a dataspace (e.g., in mobility, manufacturing, or energy domains), agreement on high-level ontology names is insufficient. The actual payload graphs must comply with:

• Required and forbidden properties.
• Value range constraints and datatypes.
• Multiplicity and cardinality rules.
• Linked Data relations and IRI prefixes.

Alexandria operates as an authoritative validation service where participants can remotely submit semantic artifacts to certify compliance.

Validation Engine: SHACL Constraint Shapes

Alexandria leverages SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language)—the W3C standard for validating RDF graphs—to execute conformance checks:

1. Shape Association: Each vocabulary published in Alexandria can register corresponding SHACL shape definitions (e.g. VehicleProfileShape, ContractOfferShape).
2. Graph Validation: When a payload is submitted for remote testing, Alexandria executes the target SHACL shapes against the payload data graph.
3. Conformance Report: The test returns a standardized SHACL validation report:
   • sh:conforms true: Payload is 100% compliant.
   • sh:conforms false: Detailed violation reports identifying specific focus nodes, failed constraint components, paths, and actionable severity levels (sh:Violation, sh:Warning, sh:Info).

Remote Conformance Flow

curl -k https://alexandria.127.0.0.1.nip.io:8443/api/v1/vocabularies/mobility/shapes

curl -k -X POST https://alexandria.127.0.0.1.nip.io:8443/api/v1/conformance/validate \
  -H "Content-Type: application/ld+json" \
  -H "Cookie: alexandria_session=..." \
  -d '{
    "vocabulary_iri": "https://w3id.org/alexandria/mobility#",
    "payload": {
      "@context": "https://w3id.org/alexandria/mobility/context.jsonld",
      "@type": "AssetEntry",
      "assetId": "urn:uuid:1234",
      "dataProfile": "https://w3id.org/alexandria/profiles/v1"
    }
  }'

{
  "conforms": true,
  "vocabulary_version": "v1.4.0",
  "evaluated_shapes": 12,
  "timestamp": "2026-09-07T22:30:00Z"
}

Automated CI/CD Integration

Dataspace engineering teams can incorporate Alexandria's remote conformance endpoint directly into their continuous integration pipelines. Any schema drift or non-compliant ontology modification in a connector immediately breaks the build before deploying to production. EOF