Re: PROV-SEM staged, ready for review

Hi James,

The ProvSem document is quite good, and it is much more complete compared
with the previous version. Below, you will find the answers to the
questions you asked. You will also find minor comments that you may want o
consider.

Regards, khalid

1. Is the purpose of the document clear and consistent with the working
group's consensus about the semantics? If not, can you suggest
clarifications or improvements?

Yes

2. Are there minor issues that can be corrected easily prior to final
release?

Yes (see below)

3. Are there blocking issues that must be addressed prior to final release?

No

4. ISSUE-579 requested that we incorporate an axiomatization using a more
standard logic formalism e.g. first-order logic.  The current draft
attempts to address this.  Can this issue be closed?

Yes.

5. ISSUE-635 requested that we address the issues of soundness and
completeness in the semantics.  This is currently attempted, by
generalizing the semantics (which unfortunately also decreases the
connection to intuitive notions of time.)  As a result, we have a soundness
and weak completeness result stating that any valid PROV instance has a
model and vice versa.  Can this issue be closed?

Yes.



C1. In Section 1.1., it will be helpful to provide a reference to Naive
Semantics.

C2. In Section 2.1, you state that "To allow for the fact that some
attributes can have undefined or multiple values, we sometimes use the set
P(Value), that is, the set of sets of values." For clarification, you may
add here that you use empty sets for undefined values.

C3. In Section 3, you use the term component, which is also use in PROV-DM,
but with different meaning. It is worth mentioning this.

C4. In the first paragraph of Section 3.2, the correspondence between
Things and Objects is not clear, although it is talked about. This
confusion is then lifted later on in the same section, but I think it is
worth saying something about this earlier.

C5. In Section 3.3, component 14, I could not follow the 5th bullet, I
suspect there is a variable that has not been declared.

C6. In component 15, I was wondering if the following inference is
mentioned somewhere: "a path between two entities that is contained in a
dervation path, is also a derivation path"

C7. In the sets of structures that are listed in Section 6.2.1, there are
variables that are not bound in the set. Some of these variables are
associated the imprecise derivation, but there are also others that are
not. In particular, if you look at the second set in the union that define
Activities, you will notice that aid and aid' are not bound.


On 5 April 2013 17:38, James Cheney <jcheney@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> PROV-SEM is now ready for review here:
>
>
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/semantics/releases/NOTE-prov-sem-20130430/Overview.html
>
> As before, because it renders math using MathML, different browsers do
> better/worse jobs with it.  I get the best results with Safari (Mac OS X)
> and Firefox does OK, while Chrome does not do very well.  Accordingly, I've
> put a PDF built using Safari here:
>
>
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/semantics/releases/NOTE-prov-sem-20130430/prov-sem.pdf
>
> Several people volunteered to review by next week's teleconference, when
> (I believe) we will vote on all remaining NOTEs.
>
>
> Please address the following review questions:
>
> 1. Is the purpose of the document clear and consistent with the working
> group's consensus about the semantics? If not, can you suggest
> clarifications or improvements?
>
> 2. Are there minor issues that can be corrected easily prior to final
> release?
>
> 3. Are there blocking issues that must be addressed prior to final release?
>
> 4. ISSUE-579 requested that we incorporate an axiomatization using a more
> standard logic formalism e.g. first-order logic.  The current draft
> attempts to address this.  Can this issue be closed?
>
> 5. ISSUE-635 requested that we address the issues of soundness and
> completeness in the semantics.  This is currently attempted, by
> generalizing the semantics (which unfortunately also decreases the
> connection to intuitive notions of time.)  As a result, we have a soundness
> and weak completeness result stating that any valid PROV instance has a
> model and vice versa.  Can this issue be closed?
>
> --James
>
>
> --
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>
>
>