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Submission Request to W3C: Resource Shape 2.0

Submitted Materials

We, W3C Member(s) IBM, Fujitsu, and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, hereby submit to the Consortium the following specification, comprising the following document(s) attached hereto:

  1. Resource Shape 2.0

which collectively are referred to as "the Submission". We request the Submission be known as the Resource Shape Submission.

Abstract

This document defines a high-level RDF vocabulary for specifying the shape of RDF resources. The shape of an RDF resource is a description of the set of triples it is expected to contain and the integrity constraints those triples are required to satisfy. Applications of shapes include validating RDF data, documenting RDF APIs, and providing metadata to tools, such as form and query builders, that handle RDF data.

Intellectual Property Statements

The below statements concerning Copyrights, Trade and Service Marks, and Patents, have been made by the following people on behalf of themselves and their affiliated organizations:

Copyrights

Each organization, respectively, hereby grants to the W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any its copyrights on this contribution, to copy, publish and distribute the contribution under the W3C document licenses.
Additionally, should the Submission be used as a contribution towards a W3C Activity, each organization grants a right and license of the same scope to any derivative works prepared by the W3C and based on, or incorporating all or part of, the contribution. Each organization further agrees that any derivative works of this contribution prepared by the W3C shall be solely owned by the W3C.

Patents

Each organization, respectively, agrees to offer licenses according to the W3C Royalty-Free licensing requirements described in section 5 of the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy for any portion of the Submission that is subsequently incorporated in a W3C Recommendation.

Suggested action

The RDF Validation workshop, held in September 2013, showed that:

There was consensus on the need for
  1. Declarative definition of the structure of a graph for validation and description.
  2. Extensible to address specialized use cases.
  3. A mechanism to associate descriptions with data.

And:

The participants agreed that there is currently no standard addressing these needs and the W3C should do something about it. The majority of participants agreed that the W3C should create a Working Group to develop a Recommendation that provides a declarative way of expressing a set of basic integrity constraints governing an RDF graph with an extension mechanism to handle more complex scenarios.

We suggest that the Consortium proceeds with the creation of such a Working Group and uses this Submission as a starting point.

Resources

To help with this work we expect, but do not commit, to be able to provide representatives to participate in the working group.

Contact

Inquiries from the public or press about this Submission should be directed to: Steve Holbrook <shh@us.ibm.com>

Submitted

This 11th of February, 2014,