Re: vote for supporting "closed shapes"

On Apr 22, 2015 11:51 PM, "Erik Wilde" <dret@berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.

Just FYI, the questionnaire to which you refer later in this thread is
specifically not restricted to the shapes WG. (In fact, all of the
respondents to date are outside of the WG.)

> 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) |
>            | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |
>