Sunsetting support for SPIN constraints

[Irene Polikoff]

This month marks the fourth anniversary of SHACL becoming a W3C standard. SHACL is now supported by nearly all major RDF technology vendors. It has become much wider known and used than SPIN ever was. TopQuadrant offers industry leading support for SHACL. 

With this, we are starting a gradual process for sunsetting some of the SPIN capabilities. Details of the schedule will be developed in consultation with customers. 

We are starting with SPIN constraints (see https://www.topquadrant.com/technology/sparql-rules-spin/spin-constraints/) as SHACL Constraints offer all the functionality of SPIN Constraints and much more with its pre-defined constraint library. We plan to sunset support for SPIN Constraints in the 7.1 release in October 2021. SPIN rules, templates and functions will still be supported.

We believe that the vast majority (hopefully, all) of our users today are already using only SHACL for data validation. Thus, we expect this to have very little impact on our customers. If, by any chance, you are still using SPIN Constraints, now is a good time to start the migration.

Regards,

Irene Polikoff