PROV-WG response to comments on constraints

Hi Antoine,

I'm writing on behalf of the Provenance Working Group with the group's response to your feedback. Paul Groth, who handled your comment originally, is traveling at the moment.

Thanks for your active engagement with helping improve W3C PROV. We have taken a look at your comment, in the email archived here.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-prov-comments/2012Oct/0004.html

Because your detailed feedback reflected a number of different concerns, we created several tracked sub-issues on the PROV-CONSTRAINTS document:

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/576
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/577
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/578
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/579
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/580
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/581
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/582
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/583
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/584
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/585
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/586
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/587
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/588

As you may be aware, the formal response period for PROV-CONSTRAINTS ended on October 10, and your comments were submitted after that time; nevertheless, we have made an effort to address each of your comments, either by making changes to the document, or by providing more detailed justification for the design decisions we have made.  You can find our responses here:

1.6.2 ISSUE-576 (logical definition and comments on prov-constraints)
1.6.3 ISSUE-582 (document-instance)
1.6.4 ISSUE-586 (toplevel-bundle-description)
1.6.5 ISSUE-587 (rdf-analogies)
1.6.6 ISSUE-588 (strictly-precedes-irreflexive)
1.6.7 ISSUE-584 (merging)
1.6.8 ISSUE-579 (declarative-fol-specification)
1.6.9 ISSUE-585 (applying-satisfying-constraints)
1.6.10 ISSUE-583 (equivalent-instances-in-bundles)
1.6.11 ISSUE-580 (drop-syntactic-sugar-definitions)
1.6.12 ISSUE-577 (valid-vs-consistent)
1.6.13 ISSUE-578 (equivalence)
1.6.14 ISSUE-581 (avoid-specifying-algorithm)

The changes are reflected in the current editor's draft, which also contains a summary of changes since the Last Call Working Draft:

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/prov-constraints.html
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/diff-c.html

Please note, in particular, that ISSUE-579 has been transferred to the PROV-SEM document, since our planned resolution to this issue is to include the suggested first-order axiomatization in PROV-SEM.  We have made a start at giving the first-order axiomatization explicitly as part of the current draft of PROV-SEM, which is here:

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/FormalSemanticsLC#Axiomatization

We naturally would welcome your feedback on PROV-SEM as it progresses (the group plans to release it as a "Note" complementing the recommendations).

As part of the W3C process, for each issue, we need to have an acknowledgement from you that our responses resolve your comment(s) or if not a bit of description as to why. Could you please provide this for us?

Thanks again for all your help,
--James