The Semantic Web Language Server: Enhancing the Developer Experience for Semantic Web Practitioners

Abstract

The Semantic Web has introduced a variety of syntaxes for e.g., serializing, querying, and validating linked data, such as Turtle, SPARQL, and SHACL. While these formats enable powerful interactions with data, they are highly sensitive to human error; even minor typos can disrupt the semantics of a document, rendering it invalid or non-interoperable. In this paper, we study how the authoring experience of Semantic Web documents can be enhanced through the use of the Language Server Protocol (LSP) with for instance code completion, syntax highlighting and live validation output. To that extent, we introduce the Semantic Web Language Server (SWLS), an LSP implementation with features such as real-time syntax validation, context-aware autocompletion, and SHACL-based diagnostics to notify users of potential mistakes when interacting with Semantic Web documents. By extending functionalities beyond what is already supported by the best-in-class YASGUI interface, our tool aims to further improve the development efficiency, precision, and confidence of power users, newcomers, domain experts, and data engineers. It integrates seamlessly into established Web-based and desktop development environments, and its layered architecture facilitates extending the code base to support new features in the future.