Re: Two Standards ?

I don't doubt that we could come up with some common ground, but it seems
that we actually are making more work for ourselves.  We can observe that
we have two very different (and both valid) contexts of use, and build
technology for each of them.

This seems not too dissimilar to what happened with the various OWL
profiles; those who wanted to work in rules did OWL-RL, those who wanted
datalog did OWL-QL, etc.  There is consistency among the languages, but the
utilization expectations are quite different.


Could we do something like that here?

I am not proposing that we throw in the towel and confess that we can't
come to a consensus.  I am thinking about the extra work of reconciling
different contextual viewpoints into a single standard, rather than having
profiles that filter at the start on these viewpoints.



Dean




On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Arnaud Le Hors <lehors@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> I don't think there is evidence yet that a common solution can't be found.
> Yesterday's strawpoll tells me there is hope we can find some common ground
> to build on to produce a standard that we can all live with. This may not
> be anyone's personal preference but standards are typically not.
>
> It may be that eventually some will seek to define other standards but
> this won't happen here. Our charter doesn't give us that possibility.
> --
> Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Web Technologies -
> IBM Software Group
>
>
>
>
> From:        Dean Allemang <dallemang@workingontologist.com>
> To:        Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
> Cc:        RDF Data Shapes Working Group <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>
> Date:        02/12/2015 08:08 PM
> Subject:        Re: Two Standards ?
> Sent by:        deanallemang@gmail.com
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
> I have been talking about Shapes with my FIBO colleagues - we continue to
> face the expressivity issues around OWL (role intersections and friendly
> fire seem to come up a lot for us).  We are moving in to things like
> SPIN/SWRL, and/or FIBO-RIF(a proposal that I worked on  last July that
> moves everything into a subset of RIF) to solve our expressivity issues.
> We are currently going to do all of this in Informative Annexes (as opposed
> to normative recommendations), because we don't (yet) have a good standard
> in which to write these things.
>
> An expressive shapes language, based on SPARQL, would satisfy our group's
> needs quite well.
>
> I wonder a bit about the relationship between the two languages that
> Holger proposes - is it important that we be able to define how a ShEx
> shape corresponds to an LDOM definition?  Or are they being used in
> completely different places?  I guess if we take the XSD/RelaxNG example,
> there needn't be a deterministic relationship between them.
>
> Looking back, it seems to me that it would have been a good thing if
> RELAX-NG had been done through the auspices of the W3C instead of OASIS.
> As it stands now, it seems as if one has to choose one's standard
> organization to support one's technology.  If we simply recognize that
> there could be two different perspectives and develop both standards, we
> could actually provide coherent (non-competitive) advice about when each
> one should be used.  If we don't, and the other perspective has an
> audience, we'll end up seeing it pursued in some other organization.  Ugh.
>
>
> Prima facie, it would seem like we are doubling our work, but I don't
> think that's the case. As Holger said, each group has done enough work now
> to write up a coherent spec.  It would actually be *more* work to try to
> reconcile them into a single Recommendation.
>
>
> This situation seems to me to be a bit different from the profiles of OWL,
> where we use the same words with different constraints on their usage.
> Here, we are solving parallel problems with different mechanisms.  Making
> two standards, that are well-informed by one another, seems like a good
> idea to me.
>
>
>
> Dean
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Holger Knublauch <
> *holger@topquadrant.com* <holger@topquadrant.com>> wrote:
> A random thought before the week end:
>
> Can this WG (please!) produce two separate standards?
>
> 1) An RDF vocabulary similar to the original LDOM proposal
> 2) The ShEx Compact Syntax aiming at the data reuse scenarios
>
> We already have RDF Schema. We already have OWL. We would already have a
> third language (LDOM or whatever). Why not have a forth language?
>
> The situation in very similar to XML Schema vs. DTD. vs RELAX-NG. They all
> solve similar problems, but from different perspectives.
>
> We are currently trying to mix different paradigms together and risk
> producing something that nobody will be happy with. People with OO
> background will wonder what the fuzz is about this parallel structure
> called "Shapes", raising the implementation costs and creating a mix of
> parallel semantic webs. And ShEx people don't want to worry about the
> interactions of the various triple models at all - instead have the ShExC
> files live outside of the triple store. And that makes sense because even
> if you introduce ldom:instanceShape to separate shapes from classes, you'd
> still run into conflicts with other ShEx models that also happen to use
> ldom:instanceShape. The only proper solution here is to not have triples in
> the first place.
>
> Another constant source of conflict will be the role of SPARQL. The ShEx
> camp seems to be more concerned about the balance of expressivity and
> complexity, while the SPIN camp has plenty of use cases where expressivity
> is the main concern. Furthermore, a SPIN-like LDOM can more easily be
> combined with existing RDFS and OWL ontologies, filling gaps in that space.
>
> We have a handful of ShEx supporters in the WG. I am sure they could turn
> their Member Submission into a formal spec quite rapidly. From an LDOM
> point of view we have plenty of stuff already implemented, and I'd be happy
> to wrestle and collaborate with anyone to flesh out the open details. The
> Requirements document is already being split into "Property constraints"
> and "Complex constraints", so both camps can harvest from the same catalog
> of requirements. We can also share test cases and produce a small document
> explaining how to map from one language to another. But the aforementioned
> reasons and the endless discussions over the last half a year provide
> plenty of arguments that justify why the WG chose to create two languages.
>
> Why would this separation of deliverables not work?
>
> Thanks,
> Holger
>
>
>
>