Re: [dxwg] Indicate a conventional way to automatically validate data instances of application profiles (#698)

@nicholascar Thanks for the invitation to comment - I have just read through all of this again. I have found some of this to be quite confusing and I suspect this is because people are talking about different things. I'm especially struck by the comment from @rob-metalinkage a couple of comments up from here:

...individuals may or may not "see the need" for this - it doesnt require an open issue to capture non-interest in part of a specification.

My position, as stated in my email feedback (linked at the top of this issue - thanks @kcoyle), is that I and, I believe, other people interested in using application profiles to constrain data would like to see:

a conventional way to automatically validate data instances of application profiles (i.e. data which allegedly conforms to the constraints of a given application profile)

I believe the business of formally managing the inheritance of constraints from one application profile to another is somewhat orthogonal to this requirement, in the sense that it ought to be possible to satisfy the requirement without developing such a mechanism. For this reason, I "do not see the need" for the latter - or at least do not recognise that it is a necessary foundation to solve the requirement.

In very simple terms, expressed as a "user-story":

_As a systems engineer, I would like to understand from the formal documentation of an application profile exactly how to go about validating the conformance of this big pile of data I am planning to ingest/publish to that application profile, so that I may interoperate at a syntactic and semantic level with some other system which will supply/consume the data._

This issue, then, is about simplifying the process of understanding how this validation can be done by establishing some convention(s) for documenting and implementing this.

I'm not at all sure that the discussion here has got us closer to that. However, I freely admit that I have not entirely understood the discussion - insofar as some of it seems to be about somewhat orthogonal issues to do with modelling inheritance between the application profiles themselves.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by paulwalk
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/698#issuecomment-526496012 using your GitHub account

Received on Friday, 30 August 2019 07:42:53 UTC