Re: Pragmatic Proposal for the Structure of the SHACL Spec

+1 for Arthur's clarification of the various audiences for SHACL spec.

kc


On 3/18/15 3:29 PM, Arthur Ryman wrote:
> At present we are witnessing a burst of creative activity. It is great
> to see such energy in a WG. However, the result is that we have too
> many specs and I doubt that most members can give all these documents
> adequate review. We need to focus our resources on fewer specs.
>
> There has also been extended discussion on the role of SPARQL, on
> profiles of SHACL, and on who the target audience is. I'd like to
> propose a pragmatic structure that will enable us to package the
> material in a way that will address our audiences, enable us to divide
> the work better, and create a sequence of deliverables.
>
> I propose three levels of content. I'll refer to these as Parts 1, 2,
> and 3 in order to defer word-smithing of the titles.
>
> 1. SHACL Part 1. The audience is people who want to use a simple,
> high-level language that can express common constraints. This document
> should use precise, natural language to describe the semantics of
> those common constraints that can be expressed using the high-level
> vocabulary of SHACL. It should also include simple examples to
> illustrate concepts. It should be readable by people who do not know
> SPARQL. It should not refer to SPARQL. It should not define formal
> semantics. It should be possible for this part of SHACL to be readily
> implemented in SPARQL or Javascript. We therefore need to limit the
> expressive power of this part of SHACL.
>
> 2. SHACL Part 2. The audience is people who want to write custom
> constraints using an executable language. This part defines the
> template/macro mechanism. It also provides normative SPARQL
> implementations of the high-level SHACL language introduced in Part 1.
> This part should not contain other formal specifications. The SPARQL
> implementations can be regarded as executable formal specifications.
>
> 3. SHACL Part 3. The audience is people who want to implement SHACL.
> This part should contain a formal specification. We can defer the
> choice of formalism. If we have multiple candidates and willing
> authors, let's do a bake-off.
>
> -- Arthur
>
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2015 14:58:03 UTC