RE: Profiles Ontology review by SHACL CG

Hi Irene,

Than you so much for your very rapid reply. I wish all CGs were as speedy!

We, the DXWG editors, will create a series of GitHub Issues in our tracker [1] based on your comments below at our next profiles meeting and will reply back to you and the SHACL CG mailing list indicating them when we’ve done so.

Just a one preliminary respons:

> I looked at https://w3c.github.io/dxwg/profiles/, but I did not feel it was sufficiently mature…
Yes, that’s true, that Guidance document is not up to First Public Working Draft stage yes and getting it there is our current work. While that document may provide better context when nearer completion, the Profiles Ontology should be somewhat stand-alone so I think we need to work on improving that.

I’ll be in touch with Issues shortly, thanks again,

Nick


[1] https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/


From: Irene Polikoff <irene@topquadrant.com>
Sent: Monday, 14 January 2019 1:40 AM
To: Car, Nicholas (L&W, Dutton Park) <Nicholas.Car@csiro.au>
Cc: public-shacl@w3.org; Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au>
Subject: Re: Profiles Ontology review by SHACL CG

Nicholas,

Personally, I found it hard to provide a meaningful review or answer questions about benefits without understanding what are the application profiles and profiles in general and how their descriptions may be used in practice.

I looked at https://w3c.github.io/dxwg/profiles/, but I did not feel it was sufficiently mature to give me the clarity needed to inform the review.

The examples in the ontology itself are simple statements, identifying a profile and saying that some guidance documents and a conformance test exist. As a human readable information, it is fine. However, the intention, I believe, is more than simply provide reference links to people looking for some artifacts. Is it correct? If so, then I believe more information (as per above) is needed in order to provide feedback.

If I am to focus only on the human readability, I found the use of dct:conformsTo in the example somewhat confusing. It seems to say that a resource with the role role:ConformanceTest conforms to SHACL. Is this correct? Or is the intention to say that the test is implemented in SHACL to test the conformance of something else (what is that something else? Some dataset?) to this profile. Of course, if a test is implemented in SHACL, then the test should be expected to conform to SHACL specification. However, for me, there was some cognitive overloading or dissonance here in the use of the term ‘conform’. I would prefer to see some other property.

I also wondered why for one object property (prof:isProfileOf), inverse and transitive properties were specified, but not for others.

Personally, I would prefer to see no inverses and no properties intend to hold transitive inferences since the goal here is to improve interoperability.

If some users will publish information using the inverses, then applications using this information will need to work harder to support the inferencing. This will introduce some obstacles to adoption. Which may be OK if there is some important value to be derived from this, but the value was not clear to me. And if there is an important value, is it limited to just this specific property? Why not inverse for prof:hasRole, for example? Or transitive alternatives for other properties such as prof:isInheretedFrom?
Regards,

Irene Polikoff

On Jan 13, 2019, at 5:44 AM, Car, Nicholas (L&W, Dutton Park) <Nicholas.Car@csiro.au<mailto:Nicholas.Car@csiro.au>> wrote:

Dear SHACL Community Group,

The W3C's Dataset eXchange Working Group (DXWG) [1] has published a First Public Working Draft of The Profiles Ontology [2]. The Profiles Ontology is an RDF vocabulary to describe profiles of (one or more) standards for information resources. We believe that this ontology and the profiling work of the DXWG should be of great interest to SHACL CG members generally as profiles and constraints are closely linked.

The DXWG is chartered to provide a guidance document on publishing application profiles of vocabularies and a recommendation for content negotiation by application profile which it is doing. This ontology was not an anticipated output of the DXWG but has been created to allow for formal semantic descriptions of the components of profiles and for relations between profiles and standards. A more complete description of the ontology is given below.

We would greatly appreciate your feedback on this ontology and particularly your group, again, due to constraint/profile interplay. In reviewing the draft, it might be helpful for you to keep in mind the "Use Cases and Requirements" document that we are working to [3]. We would find it most helpful to get feedback on the following lines:

  1.  Do you agree with the direction of travel of this ontology?
  2.  Are there any areas where we could improve what we have done? [please illustrate]
  3.  Are there any areas where you think the proposal/modelling is wrong or could lead us into describing profiles that are unhelpful? [please give examples and reasons]
  4.  Are there other use cases for formal profile descriptions that we have not considered? [please illustrate]
Also:

  1.  How do you see constraint languages like SHACL benefiting or not from profile definitions created using the Profiles Ontology?
  2.  How will profile definitions like this help or hinder people in using SHACL v. ShEx?

Please also feel free to make any other comments and suggestions regarding the draft. Note that positive comments or general assent to the work's design are very welcome, as these provide evidence of community acceptance. We would like to receive comments on this draft by January 31, 2019, so that those can inform our next working draft.

Please send comments through GitHub issues (https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues - tag 'profile-description') or through email at public-dxwg-comments@w3.org<mailto:public-dxwg-comments@w3.org>.

Thank you,

Nicholas (on behalf of the W3C DXWG)

[1] https://www.w3.org/2017/dxwg/charter

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/WD-dx-prof-20181218/ although ED latest might be more useful: https://w3c.github.io/dxwg/profilesont/

[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/dcat-ucr/


The Profiles Ontology - description

The Profiles Ontology (PROF) is a small RDF vocabulary to describe profiles of (one or more) data specifications, i.e., a named set of constraints over those specifications. It provides the general pattern of narrowing the scope of a specification with additional, but consistent, constraints. It is particularly relevant to data exchange situations where conformance to profiles is expected and carries additional context. PROF enables profile descriptions to specify the role of resources related to data exchange such as schemas, ontologies, rules about use of controlled vocabularies, validation tools, and guidelines. PROF may, however, be used to describe the role of resources in any situation where constraints are made on the usage of more general specifications, as well as the relationships between profiles.


Nicholas Car
Senior Experimental Scientist
CSIRO Land & Water
41 Boggo Road, Dutton Park, QLD 4102, Australia
E nicholas.car@csiro.au<mailto:nicholas.car@csiro.au> M 0477 560 177 P 07 3833 5632