proposal for issue-211

After a lot of thought, I would like to propose a change in shacl to close
this issue.

the change is a slight variation of Peter's proposal option #2 from this
email
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-shapes/2016Nov/0053.html

The variation adds the notion of sh:PropertyShape as a subClass of sh:Shape.
This makes it easier to define some annotation properties like sh:label
that make sense on properties only and gives us the option to keep
sh:property in the language if we want to.

if we decide to keep sh:property, it will become a constraint like sh:shape
but it will make all our existing syntax valid and with the exact same
behaviour.
So this approach will have no effect on the existing syntax but will also
regularise the language and enable some new shorter forms of shapes e.g.

ex:S1 a sh:Shape ;
  sh:targetClass ex:Person;
  sh:property [
    sh:predicate ex:name ;
    sh:minCount 1 .
  ]

could be also written as

ex:S1 a sh:Shape ;
  sh:targetClass ex:Person;
  sh:predicate ex:name ;
  sh:minCount 1 .

if we decide to drop sh:property we would use sh:shape instead and reduce
the alternate ways we can define the same thing.

I also checked this offline with Peter and he is willing to help us get the
new terminology right should we decide to go this way

Best,
Dimitris

-- 
Dimitris Kontokostas
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig & DBpedia Association
Projects: http://dbpedia.org, http://rdfunit.aksw.org,
http://aligned-project.eu
Homepage: http://aksw.org/DimitrisKontokostas
Research Group: AKSW/KILT http://aksw.org/Groups/KILT