What inferencing can or must be used?

This page is about the various mechanisms to associate a resource (or set of resources) with shapes. The main goal of this linkage is to make sure that a constraint checking engine has enough information to figure out which conditions to validate. Another goal is to provide structural information that can be used for other purposes, in particular to learn "which properties are relevant" for a given resource and what are the characteristics of those properties.

Issue 5 is concerned with this mechanism.

TBD

For the sake of this discussion let's use the following terms:

• A Shape is a formal description of a set of resources that fulfill certain constraints
• A Class is a Shape that also can be instantiated (via rdf:type) and can have rdfs:subClassOf relationships

Theoretically this could be expressed in RDF using

   :Shape
     

Different Ways of Associating Constraints or Shapes with RDF Resources

Constraints at Classes