Re: About WG process Re: the role of public-rdf-shapes@w3.org

Holger,

While there certainly is room for disagreement on whether the 
specification is "full of problems" or not and how good a specification 
needs to be to benefit the W3C and the community at large, I have no 
reason to believe that Peter doesn't want to have a solution as much as 
anybody else and I don't think it is constructive to start casting doubts 
about each other's motives.

I would therefore ask you to refrain from making these kinds of comments 
moving forward and instead try - no matter how frustrating this might be 
for you - to make progress on addressing public comments. Of course you 
may also choose to ignore them but they won't go away. For that matter I 
must point out that Peter is not the only person to have expressed 
concerns about some aspects of the spec and, at the end of the day the 
Director is the one who will need to be convinced that we've done a good 
enough job to move the spec forward on the Rec track.
--
Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Web Technologies - 
IBM Cloud




From:   Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
To:     "public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org" <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>
Date:   09/29/2016 01:40 AM
Subject:        Re: About WG process Re: the role of 
public-rdf-shapes@w3.org



WG members,

I think this is alarming:

On 29/09/2016 6:47, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> The worst result of the RDF Data Shapes Working Group, from a W3C 
viewpoint
> and probably from the viewpoint of users of the Semantic Web, is a W3C
> Recommendation on SHACL that is full of problems.  The second-worst 
result of
> the RDF Data Shapes Working Group, from a W3C viewpoint and probably 
from the
> viewpoint of users of the Semantic Web, is a W3C Candidate 
Recommendation on
> SHACL that is full of problems and does not progress to recommendation.
>
> What is going to make these undesirable results most likely is not 
adequately
> addressing comments that the working group receives on its working 
drafts.  If
> the working group does not have the resources to consider and respond to 
such
> comments it should just quit now.
>

I interpret this as saying "better no SHACL at all than a SHACL 'full of 
problems'". Of course, the definition of 'full of problems' is subject 
to personal opinion and preferences, and some people have different 
tolerance to fuzziness than others, and some people see problems where 
others don't. While I agree that some issues that have been pointed out 
were indeed problems that needed to be fixed, others are in my personal 
opinion rather editorial. In fact I believe only two technical changes 
were made so far based on the recent comments - adding DISTINCT to some 
SPARQL queries and the removal of the shapesGraph argument from 
sh:hasShape. The other suggestions merely lead to editorial 
clarifications. And on some reported issues, it is perfectly valid to 
have diverging opinions. The person reporting an issue is not 
automatically "right".

I believe SHACL fills an important gap in the semantic technology 
landscape. Some people may theoretically see SHACL as an unwelcome 
competition to the established technologies that they have worked with 
in the past. While I hope this isn't happening, and I am not claiming 
this is happening here, the WG should IMHO stay alert to this 
possibility, and that the rules of the formal W3C process may be used 
against us.

Holger

PS: Thanks, Karen, for starting the page to track the comments. I may 
have more time next week to continue looking into them.