Anyone in support of SPARQL ASK constraints?

In an attempt to simplify the SHACL spec for users and implementers, I 
would like to remove support for constraints based on SPARQL ASK. These 
were supported in SPIN, because they are quick to write and produce a 
boolean. However, they also caused issues in that many people did not 
expect to return false to signal OK. The reason for that is that SELECT 
and CONSTRUCT queries produce constraint violations, so the WHERE clause 
should consistently return rows for the violating resources and values. 
ASK can usually easily be replaced with SELECT * or SELECT (?this AS ?root).

So is anyone currently in favor of keeping ASK in?

     http://w3c.github.io/data-shapes/shacl/#sparql-constraints-ask

If I don't hear back, I'll take them out of the draft on Monday.

Thanks
Holger

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2015 02:12:07 UTC