Re: using Shape Expressions to validate RDF graphs

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

>
>
> On 7/11/14, 9:31 AM, Jose Emilio Labra Gayo wrote:
>
>> I mean, OWL and Shape Expressions have different goals...with OWL you
>> model an ontology of concepts, while with Shape Expressions you just
>> describe the shapes of RDF graphs.
>>
>
> Jose, do you see them as complementary, perhaps working together? In other
> words, is a solution needed that checks both OWL(-type) inferences AND the
> shapes of the graphs? (I'm trying to get at the overall scope of the need.)


Yes, definitely.

In my point of view, OWL is very good at semantic level while Shape
Expressions are more suited for the syntactic level or data integration
level.

Peter's example: "the spouse of every person is a person" seems for me more
at the semantic or domain model level...and I would probably model it in
OWL.

In practice, if you have information like:

:john :spouse :mary .

and the previous declaration in OWL, the system could infer that :mary is a
Person and if there were some declarations saying that mary is not a
person, the system would detect an inconsistency.

Apart from that, if you have a data portal about people, you may be
interested to say that a resource has the shape of a Person and has some
properties, like ":spouse", "foaf:name", etc. In this case, you are
describing the RDF graph that you are publishing or that someone can
consume from your data portal...

I think the motivations for declaring the Shape Expressions of a data
portal are very pragmatic and I have found that they cover a need for RDF
data publication, consumption and integration...but of course, they are
complementary with having OWL ontologies.

Best regards, Jose Labra

>
>
> kc
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>
>


-- 
Saludos, Labra