PROV feedback

To the W3C PROV working group:

This email is in response to the call for comment and feedback on the
current working draft of the PROV model.  I reviewed the PROV
documentation following a recommendation from Jim McCusker.

I am impressed with the volume of PROV documentation.  I did not have
time to thoroughly review all of the documents that comprise the PROV
spec, but I was able to review the Primer, Notation, and Data Model.  I
found PROV to be relatively complete and well-documented.  Thank you for
all of the effort the working group has put into this.

I have attached a document that contains my detailed comments and
feedback.  Thanks to Tim Lebo and Jim McCusker for answering some of my
early questions via email.

As part of my review and learning process, I also created a UML model of
PROV.  This allowed me to actively understand the model and see the
effects of change proposals.  I attached a document that summarizes my
proposed changes and a series of images from the model that I created
(which incorporates the proposed changes), which I hope will help make
the proposed changes more clear to the work group.  This is done in the
spirit of offering ideas and solutions, not just complaints.

I would be happy to discuss these documents with the work group if my
comments are unclear (which is likely).  I am interested in your
response to these suggestions and I look forward to seeing the final
PROV spec.

Finally, some context for my interest in this work.  I am looking for a
provenance model to use for pharmacogenomics.  Now that I feel like I
have a decent understanding of the model I will evaluate it for use in
this scenario.  I suspect I will need to extend the model to capture
more information about why changes were made, not just when and how they
were made.  This may be outside the scope of PROV.

Regards,

Robert R. Freimuth, Ph.D.
Associate Consultant
Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics
Assistant Professor of Medical Informatics
_______________________________
Mayo Clinic
200 First Street SW
Rochester, MN 55905
www.mayoclinic.org

 <<PROV_Feedback.zip>>