RE: Question on Handling of Ill-formed Shapes Graphs

On Monday, February 20, 2017 2:17 AM, Irene Polikoff [mailto:irene@topquadrant.com] wrote:

> The spec says that a SHACL Core processor must be able to validate data against any
> shape in the shapes graph that is expressed using SHACL Core and is well formed.

Agreed.

> The spec does not place a conformance requirement on the SHACL Core processor with
> respect to the shapes that are ill formed. For example, the processor could silently
> ignore such a shape and move on with validating data against all the well formed
> shapes in the shapes graph. It could also ignore it and move on with other validations,
> but issue a warning that one of the shapes was ill formed. Or it could stop any further
> processing and perform no validation against the shapes graph if it contains an ill
> formed shape. Which option to take is left to implementations. The spec doesn’t
> mandate anything.

Thanks. Yes, makes sense to me. And (as I wrote in the reply to Holger's answer), I propose to add the requirement that if a SHACL processor does not produce a failure in the case of an ill-formed graph, it MUST NOT produce a result with the value sh:conforms true. (I. e. the default result of such an processor must be sh:conforms false). That would make the whole system more robust since it would never produce false positives which I think could be fatal.

Thanks,

Lars