Proposal for restructuring PROV-DM into core+extensions

Following Thursday's telecon, I've done an initial cut of a proposal for 
rearranging PROV-DM material:

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ProvDM_Proposal_for_restructuring

I've added abstract to the document outline that try to capture the 
distinction/rationale for the proposed structure.

For the most part, I find the distinction between essential structure and 
epistemic refinement has bene fairly easy to call, but there are, inevitably, a 
couple of areas where it's not so clear for me.

(a) wasInformedBy and wasStartedByActivity - I think these are both instances of 
an (as yet) unstated parent structure, which one might call "wasInfluencedBy" - 
i.e. any effect of one activity on another activity.  My choice would be to have 
this new property in the core, and wasInformedBy and wasStartedByActivity as 
refinements (i.e.extensions)

(b) wasInvalidatedBy - in terms of capturing the essence of a provenance trace, 
this seems of secondary importance, but it does seem to be the natural 
counterpart for wasGeneratedBy so I've left it in core for now.

(c) entity specializationOf and alternateOf.  These could be argued to be purely 
structural, but I felt that they aren't essential to representing a provenance 
trace, and they are sufficiently tricky that I didn't want to risk the potential 
distraction of including them in the core.

In drawing up this proposal, I have tried to focus on reorganizing existing 
material.  Separately from that, I think there are a number of possible 
improvements, some of which wouldbe facilitated by the reorganization.

I've also included in the core some of the auxilliary material that I think is 
needed to properly explain the core data model constructs (attributes, values, 
etc.) and have included it further to the front than in the current document, 
under "Preliminaries".

#g

Received on Saturday, 12 May 2012 10:20:21 UTC