hasProvenance property name [MAYBE URGENT]

Hi,

[I'm keeping this off-list for now, because if Ivan says there's nothing we can 
do at this juncture, I see little point in opening the issue for wider 
discussion.  I am cc'ing www-archive so there's a record of our discussion.]

This is a bit embarrassing, given an email I wrote just a couple of days ago.

I'm working through comments on PROV-AQ, and Stian has raised the following:

[[
32) According to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988#section-4.2

When extension relation types are compared, they MUST be compared as
    strings (after converting to URIs if serialised in a different
    format, such as a Curie [W3C.CR-curie-20090116]) in a case-
    insensitive fashion, character-by-character.  Because of this, all-
    lowercase URIs SHOULD be used for extension relations.

Should we not have relation URIs that are all lowercase to avoid problems?  ie.

Link: <http://acme.example.org/provenance/super-widget>;
            rel="http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#hasprovenance"
]]

I had completely missed this in RFC5988, and had forgotten about Stian's comment 
when I replied a couple of days ago.

If we hadn't just been through the incorporation of provenance links into the 
published documents, I'd suggest changing "hasProvenance" to "has_provenance" to 
avoid the problems noted.

So, what now?  I see a few options:

(a) keep the same name, and simply note that, when used as a link relation, 
prov:hasProvenance is compared case-insensitively.
(b) if it's not too late, change the property name
(c) define a second property that is all lowercase, and declared equivalent to 
the first.

As far as I can tell, the main consequence of going with option (a) is that we 
MUST NOT in future define a different property/relation prov:hasprovenance, as 
under some circumstances covered by RFC5988, this would be indistinguishable 
from prov:hasProvenance.

Given where we now are, my inclination would be to stay with things as they are, 
but add a note reserving the all lower-case versions of prov:hasProvenance, 
etc., from future use because of the case insensitivity comparison requirement.

#g
--

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2013 09:31:00 UTC