Re: Reminder of the workshop and its outcome

I don't see why you should be surprised by most of the discussion in the list.

Some of us are trying to find out just how ShEx is supposed to be used to 
solve the needs pointed out in the workshop report.  Not receiving answers, 
other solutions have been proposed.

As has already been stated, W3C is not a scholarly organization so it is not 
absolutely necessary to refer to past work.  However, not even mentioning 
existing related solutions leads towards a certain defensiveness which can 
then lead to combativeness.

peter


On 07/22/2014 07:28 AM, Arnaud Le Hors wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been on vacation and haven't had a chance to follow the discussion in
> details but I'm a bit surprised by the way the discussion is going. We seem to
> have lost sight of the fact that the proposed charter was drafted based on the
> outcome of the workshop that took place last year and provided for a direction
> to follow.
>
> With that in mind, on behalf of the chairs of the workshop, I'd like to remind
> everyone that:
>
> TopQuadrant was invited to present at the workshop.
>
> During the workshop, Guoqian Jiang (Mayo) presented SPIN (with SPARQL queries,
> as it was in the Member Submission):
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/images/d/d6/RDF-Validation-Workshop-GJiang-v1.0.pdf14-17
>
>
> The workshop participants found this good for enforcement but not high-enough
> level for definition, like SPARQL.
>
> SPIN apparently has a more declarative representation, but that makes it
> basically like Application Profiles and Resource Shapes
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-shapes/2014Jul/0018.html
>
> ShEx is an extension of Resource Shapes to provide disjunction, grouping and
> semantic actions.
>
> ShExC is a human-facing schema language (like RNG Compact Syntax) capturing
> the ShEx expressivity in a much smaller syntax. Compare the ~20 lines of ShExC
> to the hundreds in
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-shapes/2014Jul/att-0002/sotaspin-text.spin.ttl>.
>
>
> Independently of the shortcomings one may find in ShEx which I would expect a
> WG to discuss and address as necessary, I would like to point out that
> although the crux of the discussion has focused on validation, the workshop
> made it very clear that the need wasn't simply about validation but also about
> definition/description - as in describing the data a specific service can
> receive. Solutions that may be perfectly suitable for validation aren't
> necessarily as suitable for description. The workshop concluded with:
>
> The participants agreed that the W3C should launch an activity to develop a
> human and machine-readable description of the "shape" of the RDF graphs that a
> service produces or consumes. This description should be usable for
> validation, form-generation, as well as human-readable documentation. The
> participants further agreed that the solution must provide a declarative way
> of describing simple integrity constraints along with an extension mechanism
> that allows using technologies such as SPARQL to specify more complex
> constraints.
>
> Participants had the opportunity to agree to standardize SPIN or CIV. That's
> not what they thought the W3C should do.
>
> Note that this isn't to say that ShEx is necessary the perfect answer but I
> don't think it is very productive to ignore past discussions and agreements.
> Any counter proposal should be positioned with regard to the outcome of the
> workshop.
>
> Best regards.
> --
> Arnaud  Le Hors - Software Standards Architect - IBM Software Group

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2014 15:23:04 UTC