Loading Ontologies and SHACL Shapes into SWLS

By default SWLS ships with a set of well-known vocabularies (RDF, RDFS, OWL, and a selection of common ontologies) already indexed for completions. When you work with a domain-specific ontology or need real-time SHACL validation against your own shapes, you can point SWLS at additional URL endpoints. SWLS fetches those URLs at startup, indexes all classes and properties for completion, and continuously validates open documents against any SHACL shapes you have loaded.

Loading ontologies

The swls.ontologies setting accepts an array of URLs pointing to Turtle or other RDF serialisation files. SWLS imports each URL when the extension activates and adds every class and property it finds to the completion index.

Example: add Schema.org

{
  "swls.ontologies": [
    "https://schema.org/version/latest/schemaorg-current-https.ttl"
  ]
}

Once the ontology is loaded, Schema.org classes such as schema:Person or schema:Product appear in class completions, and properties such as schema:name or schema:datePublished appear in property completions — ordered by domain relevance when you have a completion mode set. You can supply multiple URLs in the array; SWLS processes them all:

{
  "swls.ontologies": [
    "https://schema.org/version/latest/schemaorg-current-https.ttl",
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/dcat.ttl"
  ]
}

Loading SHACL shapes

The swls.shapes setting accepts an array of URLs pointing to SHACL shape files (Turtle serialisation). SWLS imports them at startup and validates every open document against the loaded shapes in real time. Violations surface as diagnostics — red underlines in the editor and entries in the Problems panel.

Example

{
  "swls.shapes": [
    "https://example.org/my-shapes.ttl"
  ]
}

Multiple shape files are supported:

{
  "swls.shapes": [
    "https://example.org/my-shapes.ttl",
    "https://example.org/shared-constraints.ttl"
  ]
}

For a practical walkthrough of authoring shapes and interpreting diagnostics, see the SHACL Validation guide.

Disabling SHACL validation

If you have shapes loaded but want to mute all shape-related diagnostics temporarily — without removing the URLs — set swls.disabled to include "shapes":

{
  "swls.disabled": ["shapes"]
}

Remove "shapes" from the array to re-enable validation without any other changes.

Notes on URL accessibility

URLs supplied to swls.ontologies and swls.shapes must be reachable from the machine running VS Code. Both HTTP/HTTPS URLs and file:// URIs (e.g. file:///home/user/project/shapes.ttl) are supported. Bare filesystem paths without a scheme are not accepted — use a file:// URI if you need to reference a local file.

Use workspace-scoped settings in .vscode/settings.json to load project-specific ontologies and shapes without changing your global VS Code configuration. This way each project declares exactly the vocabularies it depends on, and collaborators who open the same workspace get the same completions automatically.

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