Re: constraints vs constraining + validating (was Re: RDF Data Shapes WG agenda for 19 May 2016)

Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote on 05/19/2016 07:10:18 AM:

> ...
> There's a difference between being a "constraint language" which is a 
> language to describe constraints, and "constraining" or "validating" 
> which are actions. For the most part I do not think that the SHACL 
> document should be talking about constraining or validating - it should 
> be about the language. SHACL does not constrain, although it does 
> describe constraints and desired validation outcomes. It may be 
> necessary, at least for some aspects of SHACL, to describe the desired 
> outcomes when using the language, but that isn't an action being 
> performed by SHACL, it is the expectation on implementations using 
> SHACL. (Some of this could be bracketed as "conformance requirements".) 
> Throughout the document there are too many verbs that shouldn't be there 

> in the spec for a descriptive language. Once we settle on some of the 
> bigger design issues, I could go through and edit these out.
> 
> -kc

I cannot agree more!
--
Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Web Technologies - 
IBM Cloud