W3C

– DRAFT –
One Year Update: Using LinkML in Web of Things Specifications

25 September 2024

Attendees

Present
Alexandre_Bertails, anatoly-scherbakov, Daniel_Peintner, Gregg_Kellogg, Jan_Romann, Mahda_Noura
Regrets
-
Chair
Ege Korkan, Mahda Noura
Scribe
McCool

Meeting minutes

<anatoly-scherbakov> present

ege: two chairs, virtual
… ege intro - at Siemens, with Mahda noura, also research scientist at Siemens
… slides are public, also a link on event details in W3C system

ege: (policies and procedures review)

agenda

ege: goal is to share our experiences with linkml, related to schemas
… some previous presentations

<anatoly-scherbakov> new

ege: (see slides)

ege: in TPAC 2023 explained this use case, in schemata discussion

ege: use case we have in WoT is managing spec documents, ontology documents, SHACL shapes, JSON Schemas, etc.
… all need a publication procedure, and need to be synced
… and will get worse, as we are adding a registry
… and that will involve people outside of W3C
… we had a custom-built tool but it is difficult to maintain

ege: Mahda has done an analysis of other tools - see link in slides
… trying to understand options relative to requirements
… but linkml had the best feature set
… so we have been working on trying to use it for our use case

mahda: goal is to translate from multiple sources to a single source of truth
… want automation with LinkML generators
… want to avoid manually crafting various artifacts
… simpler process with three main steps
… starting with a LinkML schema and then a set of different generators
… including generation of the standards document itself
… have a repo, w3c/wot-thing-description-toolchain-tmp
… install uv package manager, then "uv run wotis"
… (see slides for CLI interface)
… limitations: HTML generation does not use W3C style yet. Need to add customization

mm: will the HTML gen also include static export from ReSpec and linting etc?

mahda: first step is generating HTML sources, in particular aligning schemas and HTML
… we also have a lot of test files to manage to check that schemas are valid

mm: just want to confirm that process will end at respec version and the rest of the steps will be manual

mahda: (demonstrates tool)
… in WoT we have several different ontologies
… linkml starts with the definition of set of prefixes, using an OO approach
… three main concepts: classes, attributes, and types; there are also "slots" that can be reused across classes
… can relate linkml classes to ontology definitions in RDF

<VladimirAlexiev> very nice stuff. Electrical CIM/CGMES wants to transition from Enterprise Architect to LinkML, but just starting. Discussion at Sveino/Spec4CIM-KG#9

mahda: can say whether slots are required, constraints, type (e.g. string) and so on
… note also that linkml schema is specified in YAML

<VladimirAlexiev> What SHACL can be generated from LinkML? Can I add my own constraints (eg SHACL SPARQL) and get them emitted together with simple SHACL generated from the schema?

mahda: then we can generate a set of resources
… types can also relate to SHACL types
… most of our testing has been in JSON Schema

<VladimirAlexiev> can you configure the jsonld context not to use `@vocab` (some say that's "promiscuous") but a prefix `wot:` ?

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 229 (Thu Jul 25 08:38:54 2024 UTC).

Diagnostics

Maybe present: ege, mahda, mm

All speakers: ege, mahda, mm

Active on IRC: anatoly-scherbakov, betehess, dape, EgeKorkan, gkellogg, JKRhb, mahda, McCool, tpac-breakout-bot, VladimirAlexiev