vote for supporting "closed shapes"

hello.

i am not a member of the RDF shapes WG. but i have been encouraged to 
voice my opinion on the public mailing list, so here i go.

it seems that the "closed shapes" feature so far is not a required 
feature for the envisioned language. i want to support this feature, and 
claim that having or not having this will make a huge difference in 
terms of how business-ready the language is.

being able to exactly say what is or isn't allowed is a critical feature 
in business processes. very often, there even are validation pipelines, 
with various levels of openness and increasing levels of strictness, 
after cleanup and consolidation stages.

not being able to "strict" validation (borrowing XSD's terminology of 
"lax" and "strict" and bending it a little bit here) would mean that the 
new language would only be useful for some validation tasks, but that 
others would still need to be hand-coded.

having well-defined language features similar to the "wildcards" in XSD 
is critical in terms of getting RDF closer to be business-ready. in my 
work with XML, JSON, and RDF, one typical criticism of RDF is that it 
assumes well-meaning peers, and has little support for scenarios beyond 
that. supporting "closed shapes" could be one step in this direction, 
and i would like to consider the WG to make this a mandatory feature and 
provide fine-grained controls for how open/closed a model should be.

thanks and kind regards,

dret.

-- 
erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
            | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
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Received on Wednesday, 22 April 2015 22:50:43 UTC