RE: Update and opportunities with SHACL

On Wednesday, August 12, 2015 5:24 PM, Arnaud Le Hors wrote:
> I'd like to clarify that Holger's statements are his own and don't
> necessarily reflect the WG's opinion. Our WG has been the subject of a
> lot of controversy with several constituencies with very different
> expectations about what users will want to use and what the solution
> should look like.
> Before they jump in and we end up with another endless argument, I'd
> rather try to set the record straight.

OK. Thanks for clarifying Arnaud.


> Specifically,
>> At 
>> the beginning of the SHACL WG we were collecting use cases and quickly 
>> found that if we want to stay entirely within a high-level language, 
>> then this high-level language would have to be equivalent to SPARQL to 
>> achieve the required expressivity.
> 
> I expect the ShEx people would disagree with that claim. For that
> matter they took a different approach in which they developed a
> semantics that was not defined by SPARQL but could be compiled into
> SPARQL. And while the WG agreed to use SPARQL as much as possible to
> define SHACL's semantics, there is no agreement on making SHACL
> entirely depend on SPARQL.

Good.


>> With SHACL, the committee just publishes a Core starter kit plus a 
>> web-based extension mechanism. We do not know yet what people will do 
>> with these building blocks in the next few years. Anyone can publish 
>> their own lego bricks (shapes, templates, functions) for others to reuse 
>> by pointing at their URIs.
> 
> Again, this does not reflect a resolution of the WG. For what it's
> worth I would say that this is rather opposite of the initial stated
> goal to have a solution that addresses 80% of the use cases out of the
> box with an extension mechanism for the remaining 20%.

That was my impression (and hope) as well but I wasn't able to follow all
the discussions.


> The feedback we're getting from the hydra people tells me that we need
> to quickly publish more broadly our current draft to get broader input
> as to whether the direction we currently have is likely to lead us to
> meeting the mark or not.

If possible, please ping us at major milestones. We share quite a few goals.


Cheers,
Markus


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2015 18:12:50 UTC