Back from the W3C Workshop on Web Standardization for Graph Data

Dear all,

last week I attended the W3C Workshop on Web Standardization for Graph 
Data (https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/index.html) where I 
got the opportunity to moderate the session on rules and reasoning 
together with Harold Boley.

For me, the most important reason to come to the workshop was to make 
people aware of the benefits of using rule-based reasoning on graphs in 
general and of N3 as a rule-based language for RDF in particular, but 
also to better understand the needs of the different communities 
regarding rules.  And I think in both aspects the workshop has been a 
success: there was even more interest in rule-based reasoning than I 
expected and the discussions we had at the session really helped me to 
understand where (potential) users of N3 stand and what is important for 
them.

You can read the minutes of our session here: 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-p_GgYizfxlGhc_j2z3W2sQUsLLGUOvNMMWV6vEtUhk/edit?usp=sharing


For me the most important points are:

- rules should be convenient and concise to write and read

- syntax is very important. In case of a Semantic Web rule language it 
needs to be very close to existing standards like rdf-turtle.

- a rule language should be kept simple (can be extended)

- applications of rules are for example the alignment of different data 
sources using different ontologies, compliance checking (GDPR, fraud 
detection,...) or data validation

- many people like to use rules for reasoning because they are very easy 
to explain and understand (compared to for example OWL-DL reasoning)

Given the first point I think that a representation in json-ld could 
also be very helpful as well (something Gregg already started). 
Furthermore there were many more ideas mentioned which you can find in 
the minutes. There was for example the desire to be able to specify 
where and when rules get applied to (sub-)graphs. Is that something we 
want to cover?


In many smaller private discussions I was made aware of  other existing 
rule languages and works over N3. I still have to go through my pointers 
to be able to report here (but I will come back to the list).

I would also be interested on your opinion about the different aspects 
mentioned in the minutes.

Kind regards,
Doerthe

-- 
Dörthe Arndt
Researcher Semantic Web
imec - Ghent University - IDLab | Faculty of Engineering and Architecture | Department of Electronics and Information Systems
Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 122, 9052 Ghent, Belgium
t: +32 9 331 49 59 | e: doerthe.arndt@ugent.be

Received on Thursday, 14 March 2019 16:17:54 UTC