Re: Why not adopt ShEx? (was Re: Enough already)

> On Dec 11, 2016, at 9:33 AM, Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@graphity.org> wrote:
> 
> Sorry, but I see zero advantages of ShEx over SPIN/SPARQL.
> 
> Why would I want to lock my software into a new non-standard syntax with close to none adoption, when I can simply use the query engine to validate constraints?

ShEx is fairly easy to implement, and solves a number of useful RDF shape problems. I just completed an implementation in Ruby [1], which I just announced on the public-rdf-ruby mailing list [2]. The whole thing took about a week to implement. There is a proposal for a new Community Group to further foster ShEx [3].

I believe there are a number of other implementations in various stages of completion. These days, it’s quite difficult for the W3C to create a new Working Group, so Community Groups are a great way to incubate such community specifications so that they can show support prior to “official” standardization via a working group. But in this case, there’s a good Specification [4], and robust test suite [5], so much of the work has already been done.

Gregg Kellogg

[1] https://github.com/ruby-rdf/shex
[2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-ruby/2016Dec/0000.html
[3] https://www.w3.org/community/blog/2016/12/09/proposed-group-shape-expressions-community-group/
[4] https://shexspec.github.io/spec/
[5] https://github.com/shexSpec/shexTest


> On Sun, 11 Dec 2016 at 18.26, Gray, Alasdair J G <A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>> wrote:
> 
>> On 10 Dec 2016, at 11:52, Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@graphity.org <mailto:martynas@graphity.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> In case of SHACL specifically, I think the problem is that while SPIN was an elegant concept on top of SPARQL, shoehorning constraints into a vocabulary is a model mismatch, a little like putting an ORM on top of RDBMS: it works most of the time, but there will always be corner cases you cannot hammer out.
> 
> 
> If this is indeed the case, why is the group not building upon the purpose defined ShEx approach?
> 
> Its concise notation makes it very elegant for defining constraints. I have been using it in a tool for almost two years now. The tool is quick and easy to adapt to new sets of constraints by specifying a new ShEx schema.
> 
> I also find its use of exclusive or more naturally fits the requirements I have encountered for constraint specifications.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Alasdair
> 
> Alasdair J G Gray
> Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
> Assistant Professor in Computer Science, 
> School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences 
> (Athena SWAN Bronze Award)
> Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh UK.
> 
> Email: A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>
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