Re: ISSUE-23: A specific proposal

Hi Arthur,

On 4/29/2015 5:00, Arthur Ryman wrote:
> Holger,
>
> Your proposal looks like a revival of a discussion we had months ago.

Yes I remember these long discussions, and I am aware some people are 
tired of this topic.

> Shapes and Classes are very different things. A Shape is a set of
> constraints on a graph. A Class has a set of member resources that
> define its extension. The group decided to keep these concepts
> separate.

Yes, they are conceptually different. But can you point me at a 
"decision" by the WG that would make my proposal invalid?

> You seem to be repeating the same arguments. What is
> different now? Why should the WG reverse its earlier position?

As discussed many times, the WG comprises of different camps. Some 
people believe Shapes are all they need, others believe that it would be 
foolish to ignore the existing structures and previous work related to 
classes and replace it with a parallel universe. We have approved 
requirements that rely on rdf:type to link instances with shapes. I 
would appreciate if both sides try to understand each other. My proposal 
aims at making both view points possible. People who prefer to stay in 
pure Shapes can use sh:Shape + sh:nodeShape, while others can use 
rdf:type + rdfs:Class. Yes we could completely separate sh:Shape and 
rdfs:Class, yet I see more downsides than advantages of such a design. 
In particular, cross-inheritance of constraints becomes messy if you 
have rdfs:subClassOf + sh:extends.

Instead of having philosophical discussions, I have opened this thread 
to try to examine specific proposals, with specific metamodels. If 
someone has better suggestions, then I would like to read details about 
them. As this Class-vs-Shapes topic is very important to some people 
here, I believe we have best chances with a proposal that allows both 
modeling approaches to be used, and then let the users decide which 
design they prefer in practice. It's a web-based standard after all.

Thanks
Holger

Received on Tuesday, 28 April 2015 22:51:54 UTC