Re: OA and provenance

On Aug 15, 2013, at 4:08 PM, Paolo Ciccarese <paolo.ciccarese@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Could you elaborate on  "achieve all of this with subclasses/subproperties in OA"? Are you thinking of using sub-properties of oa:annotatedBy for instance? 
>  

Yes, that was indeed what I was thinking of.

> 
> If I look at the document of <ann1> and I don't have access to <ann2> I have no idea about who encoded that into the digital artifact.

Yes, but that is also true for all annotations: if I look at the body of <ann1> and do not have access to <ann1>, I have no idea about these Darwin's annotations either…

> 
> I wonder:
> (1) is it fair for a client accessing document of <ann1> to understand that Darwin created that annotation even if there has been a transformation process in between that we did not track down provenance wise?

I'm with Stian here: you always need to be careful what the entity is that you are making a prov statement about. Here: is it the annotation or the digitized version of the annotation? Do you want to keep the distiction or not?  I do not think there are good general guidelines to answer these questions apart from "do whatever is most practical for your application".  Before you know it you are in one of these "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" discussions :-)

> (2) is it fair to use Annotations to do the job that RDF does already? Where am I drawing the line? 
> 

Ah! Don't get me started … I've stated before on this list that I think an annotation should be just a reified RDF triple (S,P,O), with a target (=S), a body (=O) but also with a relation (=P, which could default to oa:annotates).  Then the answer to your question is: you might use plain vanilla RDF,  except when you need to state the agent/time/place making a claim on a per-triple basis, when OA is more convenient. But not everyone seems to agree with me that the relation is useful - see  also the discussion on http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-openannotation/2012Jun/0001.html.

> In regards to (2) I would stick to the annotation activity: a Student digitizing Darwin annotation is one task.
> 
> In regards to (1) I would probably rather say:
> 
> <ann1> oa:annotatedBy <Darwin> 
>              pav:authoredBy <Darwin> # This is redundant for some reasons related to my application but could be omitted 
>              pav:curatedBy<Student1> #Student that extracted the association 
>              pav:createdBy <Student2> # Student that encoded the annotation artifact
> 
> This is legal,  self-contained and it does not require to alter the interpretation of the current model and carries with it the full provenance of what happened (without de-chaining). 

Yes, I think this is fine. The tradeoff could be: would it help or hurt other OA apps if you would make pav:curatedBy and pav:createdBy subPropertyOf oa:annotatedBy?
If giving these students credits is important, this might be a valid option ...

Jacco

Received on Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:11:50 UTC