Re: is shexc useful?

On 8/7/2014 21:06, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> No disagreement at all.   I completely agree that practical experience is tremendously useful.   I might argue it's never quite possible to "get things right".

Good to see convergence. Thanks.

>
> I guess there are two issues at play.
>
> 1. The process of getting buy in from a wide community seems to nearly always involve allowing members of that community to invent new things.  I'm not saying this is good, but it ends up often being necessary.  Key vendors always seem to want to tweak something.    Maybe it's because they just see the world a little differently, or maybe it's something else.

The ability for key vendors to tweak something is supported by the fact 
that we are in an RDF world, and any vendor may extend the existing 
vocabularies without breaking the existing terms. It is quite likely 
that we and other vendors will add extra properties, for example with 
instructions that help users control the performance. Most RDF databases 
already have their own set of extra functions or "magic properties" to 
expose their special strengths. I believe we need to embrace this as the 
reality. I would assume that as vendors implement this technology, we 
will learn which additional features need to go into a Version 2 of the 
standards.

> Holger mentioned tq sometimes tweaks SPIN.   That's going to become awkward if SPIN or part of SPIN I'd standardized.

That will be TQ's problem, not the community's. Of course these things 
will be kept separate. And as far as I remember, all tweaking in SPIN 
has merely *added* new features, without breaking existing features. A 
good example has been the recent addition of spl:UnionTemplate which was 
inspired by the OSLC version in SPIN. It has already been valuable to 
look at those requirements and compare SPIN with Resource Shapes - the 
flexibility has improved.

And to be very clear: Even though SPIN started as a project at TQ, I 
regard myself as an open source developer here, creating something for 
the semantic web and other vendors too. SPIN API is already free, and 
TBC-FE with SPIN support is free too, and will remain free. Once the 
project starts, several other reference implementations will appear that 
closely track the specification. TQ and other companies will benefit 
indirectly, through the fact that it will attract more people into this 
technology and the market will grow its total size.

> Indeed. In my less charitable moods, I'd include RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. 
> They have a large number of users, but I think still have a tiny 
> fraction of the potential users.

Absolutely! See recent articles on the overlap with NoSQL. The potential 
for a relaunch is there.

Holger

Received on Friday, 8 August 2014 00:08:38 UTC