From SHACL: profile and "base ontology"

[kcoyle]

Comment in public comments list from Irene Polikoff:

Presumably, a profile should not contradict the “base ontology” - it could only further constrain it.

kcoyle: Is this correct? If so, is there any thought of testing whether a profile is a valid profile? Meaning that it does not contradict the base. How would this be accomplished? If profiles we expressed in SHACL and the base ontology was also expressed in SHACL, one could think of ways SHACL could be used to check for validity of a profile.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-dxwg-comments/2019Jan/0001.html

[nicholascar]

@kcoyle

Is this correct?

Yes

If so, is there any thought of testing whether a profile is a valid profile? Meaning that it does not contradict the base.

Yes, this is the nature of a profile.

How would this be accomplished? If profiles we expressed in SHACL and the base ontology was also expressed in SHACL, one could think of ways SHACL could be used to check for validity of a profile.

Yes. This is one of the purposes of creating PROF with semantics that allow for the creation of profile hierarchies (isProfileOf) and ways of indicating resources within those profiles that serve certain purposes (hasRole + ResourceRole vocabulary) so that mechanics (code) can be written to do such testing against a profile and all the things it profiles.

This is the express purpose of Issue #698. My pseudo code there is written do do what you ask: for a profile, find its validators and the validators of the things it profiles, join them and apply them all to a data graph to validate it.

Does this answer all points in this issue?

[kcoyle]

The person you need to be asking is the one who sent the comment, Irene from TopBraid. You need to ask if she is satisfied by the answers.

[nicholascar]

Further to my comments above on the question of "Is there any thought of testing whether a profile is a valid profile? Meaning that it does not contradict the base.":

Testing the profile itself - any schemas it declares for instance - is possible in a system-specific way (e.g. using inference on an ontology) but more useful and easy is to test to see if instance data created conforming to the profile conforms to the base. This could be done by applying any of the base's validators to instance data. If the base is described using the Profiles Vocabulary, finding its validating resources would be straightforward.

Discussion of some related issues continues in #698.

This comment, and a summary of the discussion further above have been forwarded to the Issue raiser, Irene Polikoff, via the DXWG public mailing list: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-dxwg-comments/2019Sep/0000.html.