- From: Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>
- Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2016 19:44:25 +0100
- To: Public DWBP WG <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org>
Hi, I'm looking at BP6 "Provide data provenance information" at [1] 1. Why are we using prov:wasAttributedTo to say that "The metadata specifies that John created the Bus Timetable dataset." dct:creator would seem a more natural match. This is what is used in Void [2] and many other catalogues. prov:wasAttributedTo is not really wrong, but it feels very strange in this case, were the creation is very clear. In fact prov:wasAttributedTo has very general semantics: "Attribution is the ascribing of an entity to an agent." [3] So by using it instead of dct:creator, one blurs the information a lot. 2. The prov:wasAttributedTo statement is the only statement that is in bold in the example. This hints that it's the only provenance info in that metadata. But aren't other statements about provenance too? Especially the ones with dct:issued, dct:modified, dct:publisher. The BP needs to be careful: I think the sentence [ The machine readable version of the data provenance may be provided according to the ontology recommended by W3C to describe provenance information, i.e., the Provenance Ontology ] is too strong. Prov is a great contribution to formalize provenance and created fine-grained statements about it. But something doesn't need to be expressed with the Prov ontology to be classified as provenance, even in the W3C context. Trying to be a bit more concrete: the 'why' part of the BP refers to the fact that users will want to know "the origin or history of the published data.". I think dct:issued, dct:modified, dct:publisher clearly match this need. Antoine [1] http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#provenance [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/void/#dublin-core [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/#wasAttributedTo
Received on Friday, 26 February 2016 18:45:04 UTC