Re: Update and opportunities with SHACL

On 8/11/15 6:06 AM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> OK. What are the major missing parts? I tried to keep up with the 
> discussions on the mailing list but the volume of mails has been way 
> too high. I had a quick look at the current draft. I was kind of 
> surprised by the few constraints it defines. Is this something that 
> still will be addressed? 

Do you have specific examples of features that are missing? This 
certainly still can be addressed. It is technically relatively little 
work to add new Core language elements, as long as they can be expressed 
in SPARQL.

>> 1) SHACL should have a standard JSON-LD Context. While I do understand
>> JSON-LD, I believe someone with more JSON-LD experience could do a much
>> better job in defining a standard @context file to make shape
>> definitions as readable as possible - before everyone invents their own
>> variation of this.
> I can certainly help with that.

Thanks a lot, we will likely re-raise this topic once the syntax becomes 
even more stable.

>
> This is certainly nice but I think those extension points should be just that.. extension points. In most cases users shouldn't need to use them but just choose from a set of predefined constraints. If the set of predefined constraints isn't compelling enough, I'd expect SHACL to be a quite tough sell.

I would be surprised by this. My hope with SHACL is that we try to build 
a truly extensible language, not just wait for the W3C to prescribe 
whatever gets hard-coded into the language. Any programming language 
supports creating new functions and publishing them as libraries for 
re-use. I anticipate that most deployed server-side SHACL systems will 
have full support for the SPARQL extension point. This means that it 
will become quite safe to rely on SPARQL-based extensions, if your data 
is stored in an RDF database. I would like to be in a similar situation 
for other setups, esp for client-side SHACL systems. For this to work 
though, we need a proper JavaScript mapping from day one.

Thanks,
Holger

Received on Monday, 10 August 2015 22:53:44 UTC