Re: A proposed provenance wg draft charter

Dear Luc el at.,

I like the work that has been done at the incubator. Like Deborah, I 
regret not participating as much as I would like -- for different 
reasons than Deborah I have also had a difficult year.

Concerning the bias mentioned in Deborah's message, I see that our PML 
group has put a lot of effort to understand OPM and I cannot see a 
similar effort from the OPM group to understand work that has been done 
at the PML side. For example, I put together a collection of PML papers 
together with some highlights that are related to the first scenario and 
the response was that previous work was done in the OPM side as well. 
Well, I read all the documents that were cited as a response that 
similar work was done with OPM (and OPM predecessors) and my conclusion 
is that some of the unanswered questions (referred to as provenance 
gaps) are still open questions in the OPM side of the world.

Anyway, I do not see OPM as a subset of PML and my response to this is 
in the form of an article submission to the JWS special edition on 
provenance run by Yolanda and Paul.

http://www.cs.utep.edu/paulo/papers/PinheirodaSilva_JWS_2010.pdf

Anyway, I am releasing this article submission as a tech report as a way 
to substantiate my claim the URI for the tech report is above. Please 
note that this report is just my opinion and not an opinion of the PML 
group. I recognize that further effort needs to be done to fully 
understand the mapping between OPM, PML, and the many other important 
provenance notations out there and that is why I cannot understand this 
suggestion of us of recommending OPM as in the draft put out by Paul Groth.

Many thanks,
Paulo.

> Deborah,
>
> I think we should not forget the work that the incubator has done.
> I do not understand your statement "there is strong a bias when one
> starts with one
> and tries to shoehorn in the others."
>
> Let's be concrete, I suppose you are talking about PML,
> - what is the bias in OPM that makes it difficult to shoehorn PML concepts
>
> (ditto for other provenance languages).
>
> The mapping exercise, to my knowledge, did not identify any.  Please
> correct me if
> I am wrong.
>
> This issue needs to be nailed down. I am happy to have a teleconference
> at some other
> mutually convenient time. But, we need to be able to justify our
> position.  It's important
> to do it soon, because we can't write a final report properly with
> knowing what the conclusions
> are.
>
> Regarding the "fast" aspect, I think it is crucial too. Otherwise,
> somebody else
> will do it, de-facto way!
>
> Thanks,
> Luc
>
>
>
> On 10/15/2010 02:33 PM, Deborah McGuinness wrote:
>>   On 10/15/2010 8:53 AM, Paul Groth wrote:
>>> Hi Deborah,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your response. This is exactly the sort of discussion we
>>> wanted to start.
>>>
>>> Luc and I wrote the proposal with the notion that we wanted a fast
>>> working group.
>> Fast working groups are good but I think we should focus on the
>> outcome rather than fast.  it is not that fast precludes quality but
>> we should not focus on fast and have that preclude other options that
>> may be considered more representative of the broader provenance
>> community.
>>> With that in mind we thought it would be good to start with something
>>> already existing and not develop a whole new model. Additionally, we
>>> think that OPM is already a subset of what's out there already
>>> including PML. I think the DAML+OIL comparison is not so apt because
>>> OPM was already developed through a community process.
>> Actually I think the DAML+OIL model is quite apt.
>> DAML was developed by a large DARPA program over years with many
>> participants.
>> OIL also was developed by a consortium of people as well over time
>> (and actually there was a little bit of overlap in the authors but it
>> was relatively small).
>> Both grew up at about the same time.
>> While this is looking back, I would venture to say that if either went
>> in as a proposed standard without engaging the other community, either
>> would have had a VERY hard time getting through a standards body
>> DESPITE the fact that each had a significant community who had worked
>> on them.
>> What happened was that  an adhoc US/UK working group self formed to
>> put something together that reflected what the authors thought
>> captured the essence of both.
>>
>> OPM was emerging in approximately the same timeframe as some of the
>> other contender provenance models.  I agree of course that it came out
>> of a community but it did not include much participation from some
>> other communities.
>>
>> I think we need to look at what is out there now and determine what
>> the starting point should be and I do not think that OPM reflects the
>> starting point for some of the other communities.
>>> Furthermore, as we say in the draft, OPM is the starting point
>> My objection is to taking OPM  as the starting point.
>> I think there is too strong a bias when one starts with one and tries
>> to shoehorn in the others.
>>
>> Paulo in particular had raised a number of issues when he was trying
>> to look more deeply at connections and embedded assumptions.
>>
>>> and would change over the coarse of the working group.
>>>
>>> Anyway, since you have a lot of experience on these working groups, I
>>> was wondering how you think we could design the charter to make
>>> production of a recommendation as fast as possible with the approach
>>> you have in mind?
>> I agree that having one starting point and refining may be considered
>> to be a fast approach  but if one really thinks there may be
>> significant changes, then that may not be the case.  I think though
>> that it could easily be interpreted as biasing the outcome towards
>> that starting point (and i would interpret it that way and would be
>> unhappy).
>> I think though we need to be open to other starting points so i think
>> we have to be open to other starting points.
>>
>> I see two routes that could be taken (and of course there are more).
>> 1 - write a charter now that takes starting points as input
>> 2 - follow the owl model and form an adhoc working group whose aim it
>> is to come up with a joint submission for the starting point.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Also, at least from my reading, it seems that you would endorse
>>> having a a working group work for a standard provenance model. Is
>>> that correct?
>> I  support a working group to come up with a recommended provenance
>> model.
>> I  do NOT support a working group that takes a single starting point
>> and aims to refine that one to come up with the recommendation.
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> Paul
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Deborah McGuinness wrote:
>>>>   Greetings,
>>>> Thanks for the work on the draft charter.
>>>> I am sending this quickly because i just read the beginning and have
>>>> a significant problem with the slant of the charter with the
>>>> position of
>>>> "The goal of this working group is to refine the Open Provenance Model"
>>>> and thought I should air this immediately upon seeing the draft.
>>>>
>>>> I strongly believe that the charter of a working group that would
>>>> end up with a provenance recommendation should start with the
>>>> contender models and take the best aspects from many of them RATHER
>>>> than starting with one model and refining it.  I strongly oppose the
>>>> position that the charter should take any single model and work to
>>>> refine it.  I would propose rather that this group would work like
>>>> the recent RIF working group or others where contender starting
>>>> points were submitted  or like the OWL working group where two
>>>> contenders emerged - DAML and OIL and members from each side worked
>>>> to create a submission - DAML+OIL that truly took elements from both
>>>> languages and ended up with a joint proposal rather than this way
>>>> that just takes a single model as a starting point.
>>>>
>>>> There was some disappointment in the group when we chose to map the
>>>> other contender models to a single model, but most if not all
>>>> understood that decision from the perspective of time.  I can not
>>>> say though that i (or i expect others who were disappointed) could
>>>> go along with this position in a proposed charter.
>>>>
>>>> I am sorry that this comes from someone who did not participate
>>>> nearly as much as I had hoped to.
>>>> I had an extremely bad year with my mother's multiple
>>>> hospitalizations and general overwhelming health problems and her
>>>> subsequent passing.   I simply have had no choice but to put
>>>> everything other than family health at a much lower priority.
>>>>
>>>> Deborah
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 10/15/2010 7:58 AM, Paul Groth wrote:
>>>>> Hi All,
>>>>>
>>>>> Today on the call we are scheduled to talk about preparations for
>>>>> the final report. Luc and I feel that to write a compelling final
>>>>> report we should be clear about exactly what the report should
>>>>> recommend. There has been some consensus that a working group
>>>>> should be formed around the recommendations extracted from the
>>>>> scenarios (
>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Recommendations_for_scenarios).
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> To that end, we have prepared a draft working group charter (
>>>>> http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lavm/draft-charter.html ). We note
>>>>> this is only *our own* proposal and we see this as a starting point
>>>>> for discussion within the group.
>>>>>
>>>>> We look forward to any comments, questions, thoughts about this
>>>>> proposal. We hope this helps the group to continue to coalesce
>>>>> around a way forward.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Paul and Luc
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>
>

Received on Friday, 15 October 2010 14:34:23 UTC