Re: ISSUE-23: SHACL is already a modeling language

Thank you for pointing out that the current design of SHACL is largely based
on SPIN and that it is your contention that this means that the current design
of SHACL makes it be a modelling language.

Arnaud, can we use this a s new information to reopen the decision to base
SHACL on SPIN instead of ShEx?  ShEx is looking much better to me now.

peter


On 12/16/2015 11:32 PM, Holger Knublauch wrote:
> During yesterday's discussions, several people agreed that the real topic
> behind ISSUE-23 ("classes vs shapes") is that some members believe that the WG
> should not produce a competitor to already established W3C modeling languages.
> We believe the WG has already "failed" on this respect, because SHACL can
> already be used as a modeling language.
> 
> Instead of using classes, people can use shapes (with sh:scopeClass). Instead
> of defining OWL restrictions, people can use property constraints. Ranges have
> become sh:datatype and sh:class. The syntax of SHACL only spells out a
> different way of how most people interpret OWL anyway. There is an almost
> one-to-one mapping between OWL and SHACL features.
> 
> By actively blocking a realistic bridge between those two worlds, the SHACL
> community risks producing two unconnected silos. At TopQuadrant we would like
> to promote an evolutionary strategy in which existing RDFS and OWL ontologies
> can be expanded to be also meaningful for closed-world constraint checking.
> The choice between using owl:Restriction or sh:property (or both!) should be
> left to the user community, and not be pre-determined by a handful of people
> who believe they can predict the future from their little WG. The approach of
> attaching constraints to classes has already been successfully explored in
> SPIN. It is perfectly fine to combine the inferencing role of OWL with the
> constraint checking role of SHACL into the same models.
> 
> I consider this topic absolutely mission-critical for SHACL. I appreciate that
> those who have no strong opinion at least not block the view point of
> TopQuadrant and many of our customers.
> 
> Thanks,
> Holger
> 
> PS: At some stage we had discussed to produce a document to compare the roles
> of SHACL and OWL. What ever happened to that? Without answering what a
> modeling language really is, we should not close ISSUE-23.
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 17 December 2015 14:03:25 UTC