SKOS concept scheme URIs as values for constraints

Hi,

I've had an opportunity to take a look at the SHACL work today and I 
notice one of the use cases looks set to be missed - although only just.

The UCR doc includes the one about self-describing Linked Data [1] which 
talks about the value of a property being a skos:Concept. Are you 
considering making this a little tougher, i.e. that the value of a given 
property is a concept defined in a specific scheme?

I see that SHACL allows the enumeration of values [2], but I want to be 
able to say "any value from the SKOS Concept scheme at <foo>". It looks 
like SHACL won't support that?

Use Case: INSPIRE

INSPIRE [0] - the European Union's obligatory set of standards for 
environmental and geospatial data - has a handy registry of SKOS concept 
schemes [3]. In one of my projects, I've been working on creating RDF 
vocabularies that are compatible with the INSPIRE data model, such as 
the one about protected sites [4]. That has a property 
ps:siteDesignation for which the range is defined as skos:Concept but 
really what it should say is:

the value of this property should be a skos:Concept in the scheme at 
http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/codelist/DesignationValue/.

It would be inappropriate to enumerate the concepts in that concept 
scheme (there are 6 of them) since it is under a different 
organisation's change control.

I recognise that this leads to the possibility that a graph that is 
valid today may become invalid if the INSPIRE Registry were to be 
amended but that's a management task for the European Commission to 
worry about (i.e. the people responsible for the INSPIRE data model) and 
they would need to be mindful of such situations which would occur 
whether we were talking about RDF graphs or dollops of GML, so I don't 
think that's a show stopper here.

WDYT?

Phil.


[0] http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/

[1] 
http://w3c.github.io/data-shapes/data-shapes-ucr/#uc28-self-describing-linked-data-resources

[2] 
http://w3c.github.io/data-shapes/shacl/#AbstractAllowedValuesPropertyConstraint

[3] http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/registry/

[4] http://www.w3.org/2015/03/inspire/ps


-- 


Phil Archer
W3C Data Activity Lead
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Monday, 3 August 2015 16:48:37 UTC