Proposed enhancement to the SHACL spec

Folks,

I've encountered something that I find a tad confusing in the spec as I
edit it.  Portions of the spec are discussing what it means to be a
compliant SHACL implementation.  As an example, Section 3 states
"Compliant SHACL engines MUST support all these constraints".  Other
compliance points, however, appear to contain recommendations about what
would constitute a good SHACL schema.  As an example, section 3.1 on
Property constraints states that a sh:property reference SHOULD have an
rdf:type triple.  From the SHACL engine perspective, there is nothing we
can do with this assertion, because SHOULD is a recommendation, so an
engine will need to work correctly whether or not an rdf:type is present.
 

Similarly, the document recommends the use of rdfs:comments and
rdfs:labels, but there doesn't appear to be any assertions about the
behavior of compliant SHACL engines.

I would propose that we create a new document style with a different
format that will allow us to include these statements but will
differentiate SHACL requirements from "good coding style" recommendations.

Make sense?  

Harold Solbrig

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2015 15:56:52 UTC