Inferencing (was: Proposed change to the charter, section 4. Deliverables, Recommendation Track)

On 8/8/14, 10:24 AM, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
>
> > 3. OPTIONAL A specification of how shape verification interacts with
> > inference.
>
> I think this one feel off radar. Did you see any support for this?
>

In general, constraint checking should not *require* inferencing. 
However, I believe we should make sure that the topic of inferencing 
does not get prohibited by the charter. If the WG decides there is a 
chance to improve the semantic web stack, then it should be allowed to 
do so. For example I do like the idea in one of the ShEx papers to use 
structural information to produce new output (e.g. XML trees or other 
RDF triples). Another example is spin:rule, which is in our experience 
tremendously useful for defining mappings between ontologies, and to 
calculate the ex:area of a ex:Rectangle from ex:width and ex:height. 
Once we have a mechanism to attach SPARQL and templates to classes for 
constraint checking, we could use exactly the same mechanism to define 
such production rules - it becomes a rather trivial addition that would 
keep the solution consistent. All this could go into a separate, 
non-normative deliverable, but we should not exclude it.

Holger