There is, however, a bit of a problem with writing profiles and their 
constraints in RDF -- which is that RDF (and OWL) support inferences, 
but not constraints in the usual data processing sense. If you've looked 
into the W3C validation work, or the DCMI AP work, you see that there 
are points where one either bends the RDF rules, or moves into another 
language with different semantics.

W3C validation: http://www.w3.org/2012/12/rdf-val/
DCMI RDF APs: http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/RDF-Application-Profiles
Shape Expressions: http://www.w3.org/2013/ShEx/Primer

The DCMI group is going to be looking into APs from the DCMI point of 
view. I'm personally not sure what this is going to require, but in 
trying to think through how it might be defined in RDF, I run into 
problems, especially with cardinality and anything requiring structure.

kc

On 6/7/14, 7:14 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I have just learned about the Bibframe Profiles.
>
> Since Bibframe is based on RDF, why are Bibframe Profiles not based on 
> RDF?
>
> As I understand, the constraints described in Bibframe Profiles are 
> constraints on RDF elements and vocabularies, and do not constrain 
> mere data. I'm not sure about what is meant with "structural 
> constraints", maybe also integrity constraints?
>
> So expressing Bibframe Profiles in RDF as rules would be more 
> beneficial to the semantic web community.  I think it is possible to 
> express the rules as an ontology. By doing this, informal notations or 
> plain JSON or EBNF notations would no longer be necessary to express a 
> Bibframe Profile, the document could be rewritten to use RDF 
> (serialized in Turtle, JSON-LD, etc. whatever is convenient)
>
> Best,
>
> Jörg

-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet