An approach to increase the usability of Shape Expressions editors

There is a need to increase the number of tools that support the use of Shape Expressions language (ShEx). In this paper we present YASHE, a ShEx text editor that incorporate new features with respect to the existing ones. It takes the SPARQL text editor YASQE as a starting point and adapts and extends it to the needs of the language. We also present ShExAuthor, a graphical assistant for ShEx schema creation inspired by the WDQS of Wikidata. We have carried out a usability experiment with 16 non-expert users to compare four ShEx editing tools. The results showed no statistically significant differences in terms of time and completeness percentage (CP) between the tested tools. However, our tools obtained better results in CP and YASHE obtained the highest score in terms of precision (time to CP ratio).