RE: comments on PROV Primer and Overview

Hello Bob,

Thanks very much for reading the primer and for the feedback. A lot of your suggestions sound good, and thanks for picking up the typos. We'll discuss your email in the Working Group and get back to you with a proper response soon.

thanks again,
Simon

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

Efficient Multi-Granularity Service Composition:
http://eprints.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/1396/

________________________________________
From: Bob DuCharme [bob@snee.com]
Sent: 22 March 2013 14:26
To: public-prov-comments@w3.org
Subject: comments on PROV Primer and Overview

Great job. I knew nothing about PROV other than its general goals, so I
was probably a good guinea pig to read the Primer. Because it said to
start with the Overview, I did.

------ Notes on http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-prov-overview-20130312/------

typos: defintions, Dublic (Spinal Tap reference: did you mean "Dubly"?),
"these these", "that each document on" (that each document is on?),

Table in section 2: In the Document column, several sentences are
missing periods at the end.

The PROV-DICTIONARY summary should have a few more words about why this
document exists for the benefit of those reading this document as their
very first PROV document, because the notion of collection hasn't been
introduced yet.

PROV-LINKS entry on the table: same comment, but about bundles. (Section
2 further on has a better short explanation of this document's purpose.)

------ Notes on http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/ ------

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.

Again, great work and I look forward to using PROV.

Bob DuCharme

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2013 15:25:02 UTC