Re: shapes and classes: different

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 4:32 PM, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
wrote:

> Jose,
>
> I agree with *almost* everything in your email. I disagree with your
> conclusion though.
>

Thanks, but I think we also agree with the conclusion. What I propose is
not to force classes and shapes to be coupled...but I don't oppose to have
some mechanism to attach them.

> On 5 Feb 2015, at 08:54, Jose Emilio Labra Gayo <jelabra@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > - In the simplified example you have three classes: Person, Issue and
> Bug and you define
> >  the classes/shapes in a single step with their corresponding
> constraints. However, in practice, if that example went to the open world
> web, it would not be that simple.
> >
> > - There could be some ontologies defining the concepts of Person, Issue
> and Bug which would probably be using RDFS or OWL. The stakeholders that
> define these ontologies would be using the domain of those concepts: in the
> case of a Person, they could say, for example, that a Person has two
> parents, has some weight, etc.
>
> Do you assume that the stakeholders defining reusable ontologies would
> *not* be using shapes to define the ontologies?
>

No, I assume that there are already tools to model these concepts like RDFS
and OWL...but of course, they probably would also use shapes. From my point
of view shapes, RDFS and OWL are complementary.

Would you agree that some ontologies (e.g., SKOS and the RDF Data Cube
> Vocabulary) would be made better by including shape-style constraints in
> the definitions of the ontology?
>

Yes, definitely.


> (I do agree that data publishers who use these ontologies may well want to
> include *additional* constraints to describe the particular way in which
> they use these ontologies, like you described.)
>

I also.

>
> >  - Although in some closed systems, shapes can be attached to classes,
> when you want to publish data portals and have reusable classes and data,
> those are clearly two different concepts.
>
> You make it sound like attaching shapes to classes is something that one
> would only want to do in closed systems. I disagree with this.


No, I didn't mean that.


> I expect that ontologies designed for use in open systems will also
> include shapes in their definitions. I know I would have liked to include
> some in several ontologies that I’ve worked on.
>

Yes, one example is probably RDF Data Cube...


> > - […] we should not force future systems to couple shapes with classes
> when they don't need to be coupled.
>
> We should also not force future systems to decouple shapes and classes
> when they don’t need to be decoupled.
>

Of course not...but what I am defending is not to force them to be
coupled...I don't oppose to have some mechanism to couple them.


>
> Best,
> Richard
>
>


-- 
Regards, Labra