Re: ShEx relation to SPIN/OWL

I have some of the same concerns that Holger expresses.

Is this working group going to be finishing the definition of ShEX, or is it 
going to be examining the issue of constraints on RDF graphs?  Or is it going 
to be working in the middle?

peter


On 07/14/2014 06:14 AM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> On 07/11/2014 07:23 PM, Holger Knublauch wrote:
>> So what is the conclusion of this thread? Is the working group just
>> continuing with the ShEX language (because they have already started their
>> own baby)? If I look at the parallel thread on the expressivity I really
>> have no idea why SPARQL (with some light-weight vocabulary such as SPIN)
>> would not be sufficient and better because of the greater flexibility,
>> existing engine implementations etc. SPIN has been in production for many
>> years, has an open source API, and "just works". SPIN templates with the
>> sp:text syntax are quite trivial to support by a pre-processor that produces
>> vanilla SPARQL strings that any engine can process.
>>
>> Why invent another language with yet another cryptic syntax so that those
>> people who prefer editing by hand have to do fewer keystrokes? SPIN can be
>> edited in Turtle (and JSON-LD etc).
>>
>> Again: would the goal of this working group have changed if SPIN had already
>> been a W3C recommendation and not just a member submission?
>
> I'll leave it for Eric to address the wider question in your email, but on
> this particular point I think I can safely say No, at least not very much.
>
> W3C stands by its Recommendations in the sense of not revising them in a way
> that makes people change their code without a very careful process to make
> sure it's really worth it and better for the Web.
>
> But there's no promise in a W3C Recommendation that this will always be the
> best way to do something, especially not something that wasn't really
> considered in making the Recommendation.
>
> So for this new problem space, there would always have been something of a
> blank slate, and an effort to look around and see what technologies are best
> to solve this set of problems.
>
>
>>
>> I am hoping for a constructive discussion to understand the limitations of
>> SPIN for the given use cases.
>
> To my eye, every 10% increase in complexity for the human reading or writing
> shape expressions decreases the value of the solution by a factor of two.
>
>        -- Sandro
>
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Holger
>>
>>

Received on Monday, 14 July 2014 14:01:21 UTC