Re: PROV-ISSUE-337 (agent-and-entity): agent should not be a subclass of entity [prov-dm] from Curt Tilmes on 2012-04-05 (public-prov-wg@w3.org from April 2012)

From: Curt Tilmes <Curt.Tilmes@nasa.gov>
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 15:43:22 -0400
To: <public-prov-wg@w3.org>
Message-ID: <4F7DF5DA.2000205@nasa.gov>

On 04/02/2012 05:53 PM, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:
> While it is nice to be able to express the provenance of agents, it
> is not obvious to me that agents should always be entities.  In
> fact, they could be activities.

I could probably be convinced with a clear use case.  I've tried to
come up with something myself, but can't do so, I can always turn them
into entities.

> Consider a collaboration activity, to which several agents ag1, ag2,
> ..., agn are associated. Why can't we see it as an agent too?

I agree with Simon:

> For the sake of explanation, I think we could find a better example
> of a responsible activity than collaboration. An act of
> collaboration is an activity, but a collaboration itself could be
> considered an entity.

Curt

Received on Thursday, 5 April 2012 19:43:57 UTC