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

On 11 Dec 2016, at 17:33, Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@graphity.org<mailto:martynas@graphity.org>> wrote:

Sorry, but I see zero advantages of ShEx over SPIN/SPARQL.

I have found ShEx to be a very elegant way of writing constraints for the use cases I encountered. SHACL didn’t exist at that time so it was not considered. Writing the same constraints in SPIN/SPARQL, while possible, would have been far more time consuming and error prone.

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?

Only SPARQL is a standard here, SPIN comes from one provider and SHACL is in the process of being standardised.

SPIN is a rules based inferencing notation, while capable of capturing and enforcing constraints is not necessarily a straightforward approach. I am not in a position to say how many triple stores support it.

SHACL I believe suffers from heuristic based behaviour.

As a user, I’m more interested in the ease of expressing constraints, and the speed and accuracy with which these can be tested.

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

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872

Office: Earl Mountbatten Building 1.39
Twitter: @gray_alasdair










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