Re: Formal semantics draft

Hi James,

Thanks for drafting the semantics, it will help us pin down issues in
the data model.

I have a few general questions first, about the alignment of the
semantics and the data model.

As agreed in the call, I am sharing them by email.

1. PROV-DM identifies three levels
     1. things in the world
     2. entities, which are characterized things
     3. entity records, which are the records we create as part of a 
provenance record

    It seems that things are not mentioned in your document. I believe 
they are
    important to define specialization/alternates

2. PROV-DM tends to talk about events, whereas your semantics focuses on 
time.
    PROV-DM assumes the existence of a mapping from events to time.  Is 
it possible
    to align both?

3. Used or Generated don't seem to have activities. It seems
    counter-intuitive.  Can you clarify?

Cheers,
Luc

On 12/19/2011 06:32 PM, James Cheney wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've revised the formal semantics draft at:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/FormalSemanticsStrawman
>
> This is still work in progress, and there are a number of areas flagged TODO or left out of scope.  However, I think it would be good to get feedback on this before filling in all of these.
>
> The main issue (which is still in flux in the discussions on the mailing list) is the treatment of wasComplementOf/viewOf/foobar.  I've kept the old section that attempted to formalize wasComplementOf and I've added two new sections that discuss viewOf and foobar relations.
>
> The current treatment suggest that there is a mismatch between my intuition of entities as things that change over time, and entity records that describe temporary states of entities, vs. the view taken in PROV-DM where wasComplementOf and company are assertions about how different entity records are related.
>
> I think that handling these relations (as currently described in PROV-DM) will require adding something to the formal semantics, along the lines of a relation linking different entity records that are "views" of the same underlying (changing) thing.
>
> I also think that it might be best to simplify interpretations to be time-independent, which would align with viewing them as URIs.
>
> Comments are welcome.
>
> --James
>    

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm

Received on Thursday, 22 December 2011 16:41:15 UTC