Re: ShEx relation to SPIN/OWL

Hi John,

On 03/07/14 08:18, john.walker wrote:
> I know many people who would consider SPARQL to be a declarative
> language, albeit not with the specific purpose of validation.

SPARQL is a declarative language for querying RDF. ShEx is a declarative 
language for describing RDF shapes. With declarative languages it's 
vital to talk about the context in which it is declarative.

> Even with a declarative validation language I would expect, in many
> real-world use cases, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
> I'm not sure I understand your last point about an RDF based syntax, do
> you mean RDF/XML specifically here?

I certainly don't mind there being an RDF representation of ShEx, but 
there also needs to be a syntax that is easily written and read.

> Personally I think it is pretty cool to have an RDF representation of
> ShEx that could be serialized to any of the concrete RDF syntaxes.
> Primarily for these reasons:
> - ShEx could be stored in a graph store
> - ShEx could be used to validate itself
> - ShEx could be queried or constructed using SPARQL

Agreed, although syntax is not the only factor here. XML Schema has an 
XML based syntax, but going from the XML syntax to a usable 
representation of the model is so complicated that it's not generally 
considered feasible in XSLT/XQuery.

John

Received on Thursday, 3 July 2014 10:31:45 UTC