PROV-ISSUE-79 (provenance-uri-contract): what is the contract associated with provenance-uris [Accessing and Querying Provenance]

PROV-ISSUE-79 (provenance-uri-contract): what is the contract associated with provenance-uris [Accessing and Querying Provenance]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/79

Raised by: Luc Moreau
On product: Accessing and Querying Provenance

The PAQ document indicates that provenance information (sometimes referred to as provenance resource) may change over time. What's the implication for the provenance-uri?  Is the provenance-uri a cool URI?  I think it is not, but this should be made explicit.  There are also further issues.

Generally, what is the "contract" associated with this provenance-URI? How long should the server be able to serve this URI?  It's particularly important for dynamically generated pages.

Let us consider a provenance store, in which provenance assertions gets accumulated. Let us consider a static resource, r, but over time, what we know about r changes, so it may have different provenance information p1 and p2.

If r is accessed, and a provenance-uri is returned, and dereferenced a first time, we obtain p1.

If r is accessed again, are we expecting to get the same provenance-uri, or a different one if provenance has changed?

Now, let us consider r as a dynamic resource. If r changes between the first and second access, is the same provenance-uri supposed to be returned?
If it does not change, how do we ever have a guarantee that the provenance information obtained corresponds to the resource representation we obtained?

Received on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 11:05:17 UTC