eliminating property constraints

SHACL currently has shapes, constraints, constraint components, parameters,
and the special property sh:property.  This leads to a complex formalism
that the SHACL document continues to struggle to adequately describe.

This complexity is not necessary.  Both shapes and constraints can be merged
into a single notion of shapes.  The special property sh:property can be
turned into the single parameter of a new constraint component.

Under this new setup for SHACL shapes are uniformly validated in a context
where there are focus nodes and value nodes.  Shape validation from targets
is done in a context for each target node with the focus node being the
target node and the set of value nodes being the singleton containing only
the target node.  Constraint components in a shape are each validated in the
context of the shape.

The new constraint component, with parameter sh:property, works by
validating its shape argument in a new context for each value node of the
current context.  This new context has as its focus node the original value
node and has as its value nodes the set of value nodes for the sh:property
or sh:path in the shape, just as before.

This change is largely just a change in the description of SHACL.  There
are, however, a few minor changes to SHACL itself.  First, there would be a
new constraint component with sh:property as its sole parameter.  Second,
the argument for this parameter would be a shape, albeit one that has to
have a value for either sh:predicate or sh:path.  It would be possible make
the expected type for sh:property values be a subclass of sh:shape, but
users of SHACL would not need to know that this was the case and the only
reason to do so would be to support the validation of SHACL shapes graphs in
SHACL.

This change to SHACL would help greatly in decreasing the complexity of the
langauge and permit a better and more streamlined description of SHACL.


Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Nuance Communications

Received on Saturday, 19 November 2016 14:08:59 UTC