Re: ACTION-29 Recursion: Wrap Up

I think that the way to do this would be to not have recursion as a part of
SHACL.  As far as I know, W3C recommendations are generally open, in that they
allow for implementations to extend the language but still be advertised as
compliant.  (Some other standards do not allow this.  I think that ECMAScript
falls into this category.)

This would be much more like the situation in OWL, where a particular language
was recommended but many reasoning implementations handled a larger language.

peter


On 02/23/2016 10:33 PM, Holger Knublauch wrote:
> Could we simply say "handling of recursion is left to the discretion of the
> implementations" and close all related tickets? This way, we can basically
> outsource the problem to the open source and research communities and move on.
> The description logics community also made progress over time, after the OWL
> standards were published.
> 
> Engines that have larger coverage get bonus points, but implementations that
> just want to cover basic SHACL compliance don't have to worry about all the
> details. We simply wouldn't define test cases that use recursion. The ShEx
> people can support it if they like.
> 
> Holger
> 
> 
> On 24/02/2016 12:24, Arthur Ryman wrote:
>> I've had this action for a while but have not been able to make
>> progress due to other commitments. I'd like to summarize my thoughts
>> here and will then close the action.
>>
>> Recursion arises when the evaluation of a shape at a node depends
>> directly or indirectly on itself. If we allow this situation to occur,
>> then we are obligated to define what it means.
>>
>> I believe SHACL has well-founded semantics in the absence of
>> recursion. That is our starting point. Any new semantics that allows
>> recursion must agree with the current semantics in the absence of
>> recursion.
>>
>> The SHACL specification currently prohibits recursion. However, there
>> is some motivation for allowing limited forms of recursion. See [1].
>>
>> I believe we can assign a well-founded sematics to recursion that does
>> not involve either negation or disjunction. I wrote a Z specification
>> that defined the semantics of this type of recursion as it appeared in
>> OSLC Resource Shapes. [2] I had hoped to apply that approach to the
>> current SHACL spec, but have not found the time. I still believe this
>> approach is feasible.
>>
>> [1]
>> https://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/wiki/ISSUE-66:_SHACL_spec_ill-founded_due_to_non-convergence_on_data_loops
>>
>>
>> [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04972
>>
>> -- Arthur
>>
> 
> 

Received on Wednesday, 24 February 2016 14:12:56 UTC