RE: PROV-ISSUE-654 (primer-ducharme): Various clarifications and comments (Bob DuCharme) [Primer]

Hello all,

I propose the following response to Bob Ducharme's comments on the primer.

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ResponsesToPublicCommentsPR#ISSUE-654

Please let me know if you are happy with this response. Given the tight timescale, I suggest that I send this to him for acknowledgement following the Thursday telecon unless there are objections.

thanks,
Simon

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

Evolutionary Testing of Autonomous Software Agents:
http://eprints.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/1370/

________________________________________
From: Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker [sysbot+tracker@w3.org]
Sent: 26 March 2013 15:26
To: public-prov-wg@w3.org
Subject: PROV-ISSUE-654 (primer-ducharme): Various clarifications and comments (Bob DuCharme) [Primer]

PROV-ISSUE-654 (primer-ducharme): Various clarifications and comments (Bob DuCharme) [Primer]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/654

Raised by: Simon Miles
On product: Primer

Bob DuCharme's comments on the primer

>From email:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-prov-comments/2013Mar/0013.html

The document calls section 2 "intuitive" four times--I would say show,
don't tell, or at least don't tell four times. "High-level" would be
more accurate (and more modest). Section 2 is actually not that
intuitive, because it covers a lot of material at a pretty abstract
level. The Primer is much easier to follow once you get to section 3.

To make it clearer about how helpful section 3 will be, the bulleted
list at the end of section 1 could be more explicit that the first two
bullets refer to the remaining sections of the document ("section 2
gives a high-level overview of PROV concepts...") so that the reader
knows when they're getting to the more concrete example. You could even
add to the bullet about section 3 something like "in which a blogger
investigates the provenance of a newspaper article to track down a
potential error".

"There are other kinds of metadata that is not provenance" that are not
provenance

"the author of an article may attribute that article to themselves" the
authors (because of the plural "themselves")

"the agency also wish to know" wishes

If some of the example qnames were renamed to be less generic, it would
make section 3 easier to follow. For example, "ex:article" looks more
like a class name; ex:article1001 looks more clearly like the identifier
for a specific article.

An added bonus for section 3.9 could be some RDFa syntax for the first
example, given that it's about Betty embedding provenance information in
her blog entry. Something like this, which rdflib confirmed to me gets
translated to the appropriate triples:

   <p>According to a recent government report,</p>
     <blockquote about="ex:quoteInBlogEntry" property="prov:value"
                 typeof="prov:Entity">Smaller cities have more crime
than larger ones</blockquote>
     <span about="ex:quoteInBlogEntry" rel="prov:wasQuotedFrom"
href="ex:article"/>

In fact, a little PROV-RDFa cookbook, perhaps as a separate document or
even blog entry, could help to jumpstart the use of PROV among the
Bettys of the world.

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2013 14:59:13 UTC