Re: Questions about provenance BP 6

Hello Antoine,

Thank you for your message and detailed feedback. Please, find some
comments below.


> 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.
>

I agree with you that dct:creator is a more natural match. However, the
idea with this example was to show how to use PROV to describe provernance.
However, the current example is very simple (see next comment) and it
doesn't justify the use of PROV.


> 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.
>

Yes, the example can be improved. This was just an initial idea. There an
issue about this [4].



> 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.
>

I agree that PROV is not the only way to express provenance. In fact, we
didn't want to say that PROV should or must be used. In the example
section, we mention that PROV may be used and this is part of the example.
If you think that this can lead to wrong interpretations, then we can
rephrase or change the example.


>
> 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.
>

I agree! We're gonna update the example to include these properties.

 Cheers,
Bernadette


>
> 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
>
>
[4]

-- 
Bernadette Farias Lóscio
Centro de Informática
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil
----------------------------------------------------------------------------