SHACL spec advanced part revisited

I have applied my editorial liberty to restructure Part 2 (Advanced 
Features) of the spec. This never got enough attention so far.

I had first looked into moving the SPARQL bits into another document, as 
was suggested during the meeting. However, I have concluded that this 
would not be a good idea. The issue is that if we want to introduce 
Templates, Functions and general Scopes, each example would already use 
sh:sparql. Once we give these examples, we could just as well add the 
few more sub-sections on the details of sh:sparql. The spec makes clear 
that sh:sparql is just one possibility among others. I believe the 
document is this way much more self-contained, less confusing and our 
publishing job actually becomes easier. The overall size of the Advanced 
section compared to the Core part is very small (maybe 25%), and the 
SPARQL details were probably 30% of that.

I also reworked the examples and much of the wording, updating to the 
latest agreements on terminology. Finally I redid the Operations section 
based on my recent email. It is much shorter now, and no longer has the 
separate concept of execution languages. We need to decide what to do 
with that section - I'd say we either add another level of detail or we 
discard it altogether. If we discard it then the behavior of the 
language would only be specified as prose - not sure if that suffices.

Feedback and branches appreciated, as usual. I may continue with (minor) 
edits but otherwise believe I am done with this round of edits and hope 
we have a stronger release candidate now.

Thanks,
Holger

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2015 02:33:49 UTC