Re: ISSUE-23: A specific proposal

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 1:18 AM, Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
wrote:

> In an attempt to make the discussion about ISSUE-23 [1] a bit more
> specific, I would like to suggest the following design. I have experimented
> with this design for a while and it appears to work nicely - both from an
> implementation perspective and user experience. My current draft [2] uses
> this design in its examples.
>
> In this proposal, the base class is sh:Shape, which carries the system
> properties to define constraints, i.e. sh:constraint, sh:property and
> sh:inverseProperty. sh:Shape can be instantiated and used by itself. To
> instruct a SHACL engine, the property sh:nodeShape is used to link a
> resource with its sh:Shape(s) that it is supposed to have. This design
> pattern is especially suitable for people who want to avoid any conflicts
> between existing RDFS data models and constraint checking.
>
> In the context of SHACL, rdfs:Class is declared as a rdfs:subClassOf
> sh:Shape, which means that any class can play the role of a Shape, and a
> Class can have constraints attached to it. Furthermore the rdf:type
> property is used by the SHACL engine to link instances with their class
> shapes, in the same way that sh:nodeShape is used. As a consequence, we
> have a natural implementation of specialization - rdfs:subClassOf is used
> to express sub-shape relationships.


If we use rdfs:subClassOf to express sub-shape relationships how can we
distinguish between class shapes and ShEx shapes?


> This design pattern is especially suitable for people who want to
> naturally build upon the data models that already exist, and existing
> rdf:type triples.
>
> I believe this design produces a very attractive user-facing syntax (no
> bloating extra triples) while maintaining a very good level of flexibility
> and backwards compatibility. Existing RDFS/OWL ontologies and their
> instances can be incrementally enhanced with SHACL constraints.
>
> I would welcome specific, practice-oriented criticism of this design.
>
> Thanks,
> Holger
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/track/issues/23
> [2] http://w3c.github.io/data-shapes/shacl/
>
>
>


-- 
Dimitris Kontokostas
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig & DBpedia Association
Projects: http://dbpedia.org, http://http://aligned-project.eu
Homepage:http://aksw.org/DimitrisKontokostas
Research Group: http://aksw.org