"You say Schemata, I say Schemas"
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Meeting

Event details

Date:
– Central European Summer Time
Status:
Confirmed
Location:
Giralda V - Level -2
Participants:
Pierre-Antoine Champin, Gabe Cohen, Sebastian Crane, Justus Fries, Adrian Gschwend, Ivan Herman, Ege Korkan, Minyong Li, Michael McCool, Jan Romann, Jean-Yves ROSSI, Benjamin Young
Big meeting:
TPAC 2023 (Calendar)

A large variety of schema languages exist, defined inside or outside of W3C; to name a few: RDF-Schema, OWL, SHACL, ShEx, XML-Schema, JSON-Schema... Each of these languages have been favored by different categories of users, who in turn ignore, neglect, sometimes even despise the other languages, deemed "too complicated", "less powerful" or simply "not fit for purpose".

It might be tempting to consider that any schema language is worth any other, and that the "best" one is a matter of technological preferences. We argue on the contrary that these languages differ in their core purpose, and should be seen as complementary rather than competitors. More precisely:

  • ontology languages such as RDF-Schema and OWL focus on the conceptual modelling of the domain,

  • shape languages such as SHACL and ShEx focus on the logical modelling of the data,

  • structural schema languages such as XML-Schema and JSON-Schema focus of the physical modelling of exchange formats.

Sticking to one schema language to cover all these aspects is therefore suboptimal. Creating bridges between their user communities, to allow cross-fertilization and combined use, is a promising approach.

But it is also challenging, because it creates the need to maintain consistency across schemas at different levels. We will present different tools and methods that have been proposed to deal with this problem, and discuss the standardization opportunities in this area.

Agenda

Chairs:
Pierre-Antoine Champin, Ege Korkan

Description:
A large variety of schema languages exist, defined inside or outside of W3C; to name a few: RDF-Schema, OWL, SHACL, ShEx, XML-Schema, JSON-Schema... Each of these languages have been favored by different categories of users, who in turn ignore, neglect, sometimes even despise the other languages, deemed "too complicated", "less powerful" or simply "not fit for purpose".

It might be tempting to consider that any schema language is worth any other, and that the "best" one is a matter of technological preferences. We argue on the contrary that these languages differ in their core purpose, and should be seen as complementary rather than competitors. More precisely:

  • ontology languages such as RDF-Schema and OWL focus on the conceptual modelling of the domain,

  • shape languages such as SHACL and ShEx focus on the logical modelling of the data,

  • structural schema languages such as XML-Schema and JSON-Schema focus of the physical modelling of exchange formats.

Sticking to one schema language to cover all these aspects is therefore suboptimal. Creating bridges between their user communities, to allow cross-fertilization and combined use, is a promising approach.

But it is also challenging, because it creates the need to maintain consistency across schemas at different levels. We will present different tools and methods that have been proposed to deal with this problem, and discuss the standardization opportunities in this area.

Goal(s):
We will discuss the complementarity of various schema languages, and which tools are available (or missing...) to make them work together.

Materials:

Minutes

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