Requirement: Evolutionary Path to Adoption

I believe there is a high-level requirement that has not been 
sufficiently captured yet: how to make sure that the new standard 
provides a reasonably evolutionary path from existing systems and data 
models into the new closed constraint checking world. There is obviously 
a very large body of existing ontologies and instance data out there. 
Some of these are written down as User Stories including SKOS [1], Data 
Cube [2], PROV [3], but there is also a large body of lesser-known or 
even private data models in use.

The developers of those ontologies have already done a lot of hard work 
in devising suitable class hierarchies (via rdfs:subClassOf) and these 
hierarchies could often form the backbone of a "shapes" hierarchy too. 
Likewise, there is lots of instance data out there, often relying on 
rdf:type triples to identify applicable owl:Restrictions or RDFS 
ranges/domains.

I believe it is very important for the new shapes language to make it as 
easy as possible to reuse that data, and provide an evolutionary path 
for users who want to take their existing applications as starting point 
and extend them with closed-world semantics.

Holger

[1] 
https://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/wiki/User_Stories#S21:_SKOS_Constraints
[2] 
https://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/wiki/User_Stories#S22:_RDF_Data_Cube_Constraints
[3] 
https://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/wiki/User_Stories#S30:_PROV_Constraints

Received on Monday, 2 February 2015 00:07:43 UTC