Re: ISSUE-95: Template Simplifications

Hi Arthur,

I will vote -1 for your proposals.

First, you (or someone) should provide the details, including a Turtle 
file, on how all this is supposed to work. I am certainly not going to 
spend my own time on something which I don't think is broken. On a topic 
as technical as this specific mechanism, it is IMHO not sufficient to 
just throw in some high-level ideas. The devil is in the details. For 
example, how is this supposed to work for constraints based on 
validation functions?

Second, I believe your line of argumentation boils down to personal 
taste. Yes, people can have different preferences and regard one 
approach more elegant and clearer, or another approach more consistent. 
However, I have given *specific technical advantages*, namely the 
ability to use exactly the same mechanisms to validate Shapes files and 
to reuse user interface mechanisms and the corresponding SPARQL queries 
to find "relevant" properties. Your proposal would create significant 
additional costs to implementers, and break the consistency of using 
SHACL to describe data structures, for a something that is essentially 
personal taste.

 > I see no compelling reason to define sh:Argument as a kind of 
sh:Constraint when we have the option of separating them.

So you don't believe there is benefit in being able to validate shapes 
graphs? Then you go on with the usual Shapes-vs-Classes discussion, 
which is entirely about syntactic sugar. We only need to discuss all 
this if we decide to disallow shapes as classes - otherwise it is 
perfectly legal to use our own mechanisms and shortcuts. Avoiding the 
duplicatation of sh:Argument as sh:ArgumentShape is exactly one of the 
reasons why I argue that shapes and classes should be mixable. Yes, 
every data model could be split into two files - one for the classes and 
one for the shapes. But I would argue this is an anti-pattern for 
vocabularies such as SHACL that have a very specific global meaning.

You also state that the class hierarchy is undocumented. We have an open 
ticket about the inclusion of the Turtle file, which would address this.

Regards,
Holger


On 10/29/2015 7:49, Arthur Ryman wrote:
> WG,
>
> As per our SOP, I have added a comment with proposals to the Proposal
> page in the wiki [1]. Please review. Thx.
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/wiki/Proposals#ISSUE-95:_Template_Simplifications
>
> -- Arthur
>