Re: using classes to control constraints

On 2/12/2015 14:54, Michel Dumontier wrote:
> Hi,
>   i would like to have shapes to be compatible with OWL entailment.

The general topic of how shapes interact with entailment is still 
officially undecided. I believe many people here assume that is that 
users can activate entailment on their graph and the language itself 
doesn't need to care about that.

>  For instance, if I place a superclass in a constraint, i would like 
> to validate positive where i have a subclass in the data.  But I see 
> that as a choice that should be specified with the shape, as I could 
> imagine that you might also want to validate with only the specified 
> class.

Could you clarify whether this is about the engine (which constraints 
checks to perform) or about the constraint check itself (e.g. to also 
accept subclasses of a class for valueType/range of a property). Above 
you sound like you want to former, and LDOM handles this like SPIN did - 
when you attach a constraint to a class then it also applies to its 
subclasses. When you have an instance of a subclass then it will walk up 
the superclasses to make sure that all constraints pass. I wouldn't know 
how to make this a choice - this should IMHO always happen. In 
SPARQL-based constraint checks, you can fine tune the behavior, e.g. by 
either selecting rdfs:subClassOf or rdfs:subClassOf*.

Examples would help.

Thanks
Holger