Shapes question

(Originally posted erroneously to public-rdf)

I know that the Shapes WG is relatively recent, but I'm wondering if it
aligns with some work I was doing with RDF.

I've been building a RESTful framework with RDF as a part of the
abstraction, and discovered that I needed at way to describe graphs and
subgraphs in a way that was analogous to HTML forms. (I'm making no claims
to the profundity of this discovery. I assume it's relatively well known.)

I wound up defining a vocabulary of "paths" in RDF that could be used to
match parts of a graph, something like regular expressions match strings.
The next steps would be to extend that idea to have "captures" so that
clients can extract data from the graph without having to hard-code its
structure.

My rough understanding of Shapes is that they're largely the same idea
arrived at from a different direction, and I'd be interested in at least
following their development, perhaps contributing to it.

Do I understand Shapes correctly, or have I missed something?

Judson