Hello everyone,
On last week’s CG meeting, we discussed about shape repositories.
For ActivityPods, we have a urgent need for this because we are finishing at the moment our full implementation of SAI, and so all our apps will need to point to shapes and shape trees, in order to be interoperable with each other. So we quickly created our own shape repository, based on Jesse’s previous work, except we use ShEx instead of SHACL-Compact, and we also host shape trees.
We also know of the work of @jaxoncreed for shaperepo.com
And the work of @michielbdejong for pdsinterop.org
@jeswr suggested there may be enough interest (and importance) in that subject to propose a Special Topic Meeting, so that we can discuss it together. So here’s a poll to find a date when, hopefully, all concerned actors can be here. Please cast your vote now
Below I’m listing some of the requirements that I see for such a shape repository, but it’s of course open to discussion!
Requirements
- ShEx + SHACL + SHACL-Compact negotiation for shapes
- Turtle + JSON-LD + Quads negociation for shape trees
- Predefined JSON-LD context to make JSON-LD more readable ?
- Shape tree descriptions ?
- Easy to deploy locally, so that developers don’t need to be online to build applications and so that they can test new shapes before submitting them.
- Clear and easy process to add and deploy new shapes (possibly with GitHub PRs)
- Frontend similar to https://shaperepo.com to explore/find existing data
- Some tool to automatically validate shapes and shape trees that are added