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

Oh, we could just as well adopt SPIN, form a Community Group for SPIN 
etc. Can be implemented in a day, multiple implementations already 
exist, users exist, hooks into a widely used standard (SPARQL) that is 
efficiently implemented for databases etc. But the role of a W3C WG is 
not just to rubber-stamp an existing technology but hopefully to improve 
on it, accepting input from multiple angles. Up until a few days ago 
[1], SHACL was better than SPIN.

The WG had discussed ShEx at length and many design principles are very 
similar. We tried to make compromises to accommodate the needs from the 
ShEx community, yet there was unfortunately no common way forward.

Holger

[1] 
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-data-shapes-wg/2016Dec/0045.html


On 12/12/2016 10:36, Gregg Kellogg wrote:
>> On Dec 11, 2016, at 9:33 AM, Martynas Jusevičius 
>> <martynas@graphity.org <mailto: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>
>>     Web: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ajg33
>>     <http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/%7Eajg33>
>>     ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872
>>     Office: Earl Mountbatten Building 1.39
>>     Twitter: @gray_alasdair
>>
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>