RE: The wasQuotedFrom relationship

Hello Chuck,

Apologies for the delay in responding to your comments on the W3C PROV specifications and primer.

After discussion, we agree with you that the PROV primer was still unclear, or possibly just wrong, in the way it was implying wasQuotedFrom could be used. As you say, one would not say that "X was quoted from Y" if X was not a quotation. We still believe the relation itself, as defined in the PROV specifications, is correct and unambiguous.

We have revised the primer again following your suggestion of introducing an entity that is more clearly a quotation, ex:quoteInBlogEntry, and made explicit the text actually quoted ("Smaller cities have more crime than larger ones.")

With regards to wasQuotedFrom itself, we note that "X wasQuotedFrom Y" implies that X is a quotation, and that this follows the same idea of quotation as in HTML ("The blockquote element represents a section that is quoted from another source", HTML5). PROV does not provide a relation "X was quoted from in Y".

Please see the revised primer at the link below. The relevant text and example are at the start of Section 3.9, as before.

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/primer/Primer.html

Do you believe this now addresses your concern?

thanks,
Simon

Dr Simon Miles
Senior Lecturer, Department of Informatics
Kings College London, WC2R 2LS, UK
+44 (0)20 7848 1166

Automatically Adapting Source Code to Document Provenance
http://eprints.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/1397/
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From: Morris, Chuck E (IS) [chuck.morris@ngc.com]
Sent: 07 February 2013 19:18
To: Miles, Simon; public-prov-comments@w3.org
Subject: RE: The wasQuotedFrom relationship

Thanks for the response.  I can see an attempt to deal with the issue, but I’m not convinced that it has been resolved satisfactorily.  I still think there is a fundamental problem with the wasQuotedFrom relationship name.  I recognize that the pattern “X was quoted from Y” is used in colloquial language to attribute quotations, but only when it is clear that X is a quotation.  No one would say “X was quoted from Y” if X is not a quotation, but they may well say “X was quoted from in Y”, meaning Y contains a quote that came from X.  If you see “X wasQuotedFrom Y” and you do not know that X is a quotation, I think it is more natural to assume that it means “X was quoted from [in] Y” than to assume that it means “X [is a quote that] was quoted from Y”.  That is especially true in scruffy usage when X is not a quote, but merely contains a quote.
I see from the discussion that quoted, wasQuoteOf, hadQuoteFrom, wasAQuoteFrom, isAQuoteFrom, and isQuoteFrom were all rejected.  How about just quoteFrom?  That isn’t past tense, but it seems to me that it would be consistent with some of the other relationship names like alternateOf and specializationOf.
And perhaps it would also be helpful to either change ex:blogEntry in the primer to ex:quoteInBlog to avoid scruffy usage, or add text to point out that the usage of the relationship is an example of scruffy usage.
Chuck

From: Miles, Simon [mailto:simon.miles@kcl.ac.uk]
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 11:08 AM
To: Morris, Chuck E (IS); public-prov-comments@w3.org<mailto:public-prov-comments@w3.org>
Subject: EXT :RE: The wasQuotedFrom relationship

Hello Chuck,

Thanks for your comment. The Provenance Working Group has discussed this, and prepared a response

The main point is that we think this is just the primer text being misleading rather than the relation name being incorrect. The wasQuotedFrom relation should link a quote to the document it was quoted from. The primer currently can be read as linking something *containing* a quote to the place it was quoted from, which is allowable under "scruffy" use of PROV, but not ideal for illustrating the concept as it doesn't match the relation name, as you indicate. More generally, the working group previously extensively discussed the matter of the relation name, including considering hadQuotationFrom. While no relation name may be perfect, it was agreed wasQuotedFrom matches the intent of the relation and PROV-DM definition better than hadQuotationFrom or other relations.

Full details of the response, and the clarifications we intend to make to the primer, are below

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ResponsesToPublicCommentsCR#ISSUE-616

Can you let us know whether that response addresses your comment?

thanks,
Simon

Dr Simon Miles
Senior Lecturer, Department of Informatics
Kings College London, WC2R 2LS, UK
+44 (0)20 7848 1166

Transparent Provenance Derivation for User Decisions:
http://eprints.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/1400/
________________________________
From: Morris, Chuck E (IS) [chuck.morris@ngc.com]
Sent: 10 January 2013 18:55
To: public-prov-comments@w3.org<mailto:public-prov-comments@w3.org>
Subject: The wasQuotedFrom relationship
I just looked over the provenance primer.  One thing I noticed is that the wasQuotedFrom relationship is very confusing semantically.  Take the example in the primer where Betty posts a blog entry with a quote from the newspaper article.  The provenance is expressed as (ex:blogEntry prov:wasQuotedFrom ex:article .) But that seems to imply that the blog entry was quoted by the newspaper article instead of the other way around.  I suggest that a better name for the relationship would be prov:hadQuotationFrom.

Chuck Morris

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2013 17:11:45 UTC