A view from outside

Hi all,

I'd kind of promised myself not to get involved in standardization again, but unfortunately my employer really needs an RDF constraint language, and the direction of this group looks really worrying. At first glance, anyway.

First of all: I'm glad there seems to be rough consensus that the use cases and requirements are going to be written first. The initial list in the charter looks like a good start to me.

There is one thing that confuses me, though. If I want to make a schema for my web service, wherein I declare that all resources submitted to it must be of type foaf:Person, must have a foaf:name and a foo:email, and possibly one or more foo:phone ... then shouldn't the spec allow me to simply say that?

That is, something like

  foaf:Person class,
    foaf:name 1 1,
    foo:email 1 1,
    foo:phone 0 * .

(Please don't get hung up on the syntax of this example. I just invented it off the top of my head in 2 seconds to ask this question. It's *not* a proposal.)

I'm confused as to why people seem to prefer solutions that are vastly more complicated. Could someone explain? Are the proposals less complicated than they seem, or is there something else going on?

Best,
--Lars M.
http://www.garshol.priv.no/tmphoto/
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/

Received on Friday, 25 July 2014 08:24:48 UTC