Announcement of work on an RDF-based approach to creation of Application Profiles

[jakubklimek]

As a feedback to the blog post on Application Profiles I would like to announce, that for some time already, based on the SEMIC Style Guide, in our research group at Charles University, we are also working on an RDF-based way of defining Application Profiles and their relationships, with a long-term goal of supporting coherent change propagation among them, as they evolve.

Our aim is to integrate this approach with Dataspecer, our already existing (open source, free to use) tool that generates consistent data specification technical artefacts for multiple data formats, following the standards and keeping the data mappable to RDF, including JSON Schema, JSON-LD context, XSD schema, XSLTs for XML->RDF, RDF->XML, CSV on the Web descriptors including RDF mapping, SHACL shapes, Bikeshed based specification document, etc., based on, among others, RDFS-based vocabularies and data structure definitions created in Dataspecer, reusing them.

Our approach differs slightly from the one identified in the blog post in the way how the application profiles are represented. We work with a new RDF vocabulary, complementing PROF, and we do not rely on SHACL to represent the entity profiles. Instead, we aim to generate the SHACL shapes from our representation, as SHACL is a vocabulary for validation, not for profile definition. To illustrate the idea, here is a preliminary conceptual model of the vocabulary:

We are open to any kind of collaboration/discussion on this topic.
One of our first goals is to represent the Czech DCAT-AP-CZ profile of DCAT-AP (including the relevant subset of DCAT default profile and DCAT-AP) in this way as a proof-of-concept, during 2024.