Hi Jeen,
Thanks for taking initiative.
Could we do a 2.5 release from develop and then designate develop to 3.0 release?
Certainly. That's in fact the easiest way to do things.
I would like to release the SHACL engine. It’s been out in beta for well over 3 months now and as far as I can tell we haven’t had any feedback other than feature requests.
It's probably not necessary for this to be part of a major release, but it may give it some extra attention, for sure.
The main thing about the RDF4J SHACL engine is that it is incremental. It scales as well as the underlying store, so if you have 100 triples or 500 million triples in your native store; validation still takes the same amount of time. There are no other validation engines for RDF that work this way.
The SHACL engine currently supports the following restrictions
- min count
- Max count
- datatype
- logical or (on the above restrictions)
These restrictions can apply to
- all use of a predicate
- use of a predicate on subjects of a specific type
Validation is true/false, with some logging to give you a hint for what might be wrong.
I would love to have more features and functionality before we release it from beta. But I’m currently working on it evenings and weekends, so it’s very slow going.
FWIW I have miserably failed to keep up with the refactoring. I will try to give that my attention once again, perhaps starting from scratch and focus on the public API instead of tinkering with the internals. If we do a full-on release I'd at least like the way developers interact with the SHACL engine to be stable.
Documentation is the number one thing holding it back from a release.
Let's make that a priority then. I think we need some text on how to set it up, and some examples of practical use in various scenarios. I'm happy to help knock documentation in shape, can you provide raw first drafts of what we need?
Btw historically we add all these new features to the "Programming with RDF4J" reference manual, but I'm also fine with producing a separate HowTo instead if that's easier.
Jeen
