W3C Community Group to fix EXISTS

[Andy Seaborne <an...@apache.org>]

Announcement:
https://www.w3.org/community/blog/2016/07/01/proposed-group-sparql-maintenance-exists-community-group/

There are bugs in the SPARQL specification with regards to EXISTS. The 
RDF Data Shapes working group uses EXISTS, and other related mechanisms, 
in SHACL [1].

W3C process for corrections is recognized generally to be inflexible. It
is normally to wait for the next WG to run and end which is a multiyear
cycle - that does not fit with the RDF Data Shapes WG timescale.

Community Groups can publish reports. These are not W3C standards. They
do provide a way to record consensus or enumerate alternatives. This 
could be used to supplement the SPARQL errata process [2].

A suggestion is to use the W3C Community Group mechanism to describe a 
solution to this specific area in a timely manner. The CG would document 
a solution and create tests to pass over to the "RDF Tests" CG [3].  If 
there is no single consensus on one solution within the SPARQL 
community, including implementers and users, we can at least document a 
small set of approaches and note the approaches taken by implementations.

If you are interested in participating, there'll be a mailing list.

If you want to support the creation of the CG see:
  https://www.w3.org/community/groups/proposed/#sparql-exists

     Andy

[1] http://w3c.github.io/data-shapes/shacl/
[2] https://www.w3.org/2013/sparql-errata
[3] https://www.w3.org/community/rdf-tests/