Re: [OFFICIAL] - RE: name of the group

Paul, Dave,

That's very similar to experiences and expectations at the Flemish and Dutch government.


Paul



On 22 Jul 2014, at 16:10, Paul Davidson <Paul.Davidson@Sedgemoor.gov.uk> wrote:

> Thanks Dave
> 
> Yes - my requirement is about having some confidence about the properties, classes etc that a data producer has used, and will continue to use, and being able to encourage other data producers to adopt the same 'shape'.  As Local Authorities, there are hundreds of councils, all providing similar services, and to be able to combine data from each, we need some way of expressing a desired shape, and to discover data that is in that shape.
> 
> Paul Davidson
> Chief Information Officer
> Sedgemoor District Council
> UK
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Reynolds [mailto:dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com]
> Sent: 22 July 2014 15:05
> To: public-rdf-shapes@w3.org
> Subject: Re: name of the group
> 
> On 22/07/14 13:54, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>> On 07/22/2014 08:20 AM, Irene Polikoff wrote:
>>> +1 for renaming the group.
>>> Not only does the name pre-impose the outcome, even more importantly,
>>> it introduces a brand new terminology where none is required.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> There are already widely understood and used ways to talk about this
>>> topic such as constraint and data validation.
>> 
>> The workshop was called "RDF Validation Workshop" and people pushed
>> back that this was about more than validation, so the name should be broader.
>> 
>> I hear "constraints" meaning a lot of different things, even within RDF.
>> 
>> I think consensus at the Validation Workshop was that the core notion
>> was about what we usually call graph patterns, but with additional
>> things like constraining the types and values of literals, and making
>> these patterns recursive/reusable.    So the name "pattern" no longer
>> really applied either.
>> 
>> IBM had proposed "resource shapes", and so "shapes" ended up being the
>> word that stuck, and after some recent discussion, we migrated to
>> "data shapes" for the broader context, to help avoid confusion for
>> people who think it might be about visual or physical stuff.
>> 
>> There's nothing about that name that pre-supposes the technology.
>> SPARQL, SPIN, OWL, ICV, ...  are perfectly reasonable technologies for
>> declaring data shapes, give or take some tweaks that have been mentioned.
> 
> +1
> 
> The requirement I've personally heard most strongly expressed by those I've worked with in UK Gov circles is that given by Paul Davidson in his presentation at the workshop.
> 
> He called for some simple, easy to understand and deploy means to declare and discover the "shape" (for what of a better term) of data.
> 
> For a data producer to be able say "our data stitches together some bits of foaf, org, dct, skos etc *this* way, so here's what you should expect to see in our data (though there might be other properties we haven't mentioned)".
> 
> For a data consumer to say "we'd like your data to include at least these types and properties or we won't know what to do with it, if you are going to express concept X then please use property p for it (though p is optional), you may also use other properties we don't know about but that's fine."
> 
> Formally checking that data matches this "shape" is a useful but not primary requirement for those users. They are not looking for really complex data validation, data quality is typically validated elsewhere in the chain by rather powerful existing data tools.
> 
> We have tried wteo "actually you can say (most) of that in OWL but you have to apply the semantics a little differently and find some way to associate the OWL 'constraints' with your data". That didn't fly for these particular users - they find the specifications and narrative around OWL too complex and alien to meet the "simple to understand" and "simple to deploy" requirement. Though personally it largely works for me.
> 
> Similarly "why not just express it in SPARQL" didn't fly, fine for implementation under the hood but not as a way to comprehend what the shape specification is saying (whether by human or machine).
> 
> Probably the IBM resource shapes proposal is the closest in spirit to this requirement so the name "RDF Data Shapes" seems like a pretty accurate name to me.
> 
> An alternative would be profile. That's the term we used in the GLD vocabulary Recommendations and it does seem to be closely related to the Dublin Core notion of application profiles.
> 
> [Note: This is my interpretation of what people like Paul were saying but I don't formally represent him or any other W3C member so any misunderstanding is mine. The chances of my being able join the WG, if it actually got off the ground, are very low so I'll mostly try to keep out of the discussion.]
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
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Kind Regards,
Paul Hermans

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Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2014 14:18:12 UTC