PROV-ISSUE-188: Section 5.2.3 (PROV-DM as on Nov 28) [prov-dm]

PROV-ISSUE-188: Section 5.2.3 (PROV-DM as on Nov 28) [prov-dm]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/188

Raised by: Satya Sahoo
On product: prov-dm

Hi,
The following are my comments for Section 5.2.3 of the PROV-DM as on Nov 28:

Section 5.2.3:
1. "From an inter-operability perspective, it is useful to define some basic categories of agents since it will improve the use of provenance records by applications. There should be very few of these basic categories to keep the model simple and accessible. There are three types of agents in the model:
* Person: agents of type Person are people. (This type is equivalent to a "foaf:person" [FOAF])
* Organization: agents of type Organization are social institutions such as companies, societies etc. (This type is equivalent to a "foaf:organization" [FOAF])
* SoftwareAgent: a software agent is a piece of software."
Comment: Why should the WG model only these three types of agents explicitly. What about biological agents (e.g E.coli responsible for mass food poisoning), "hardware" agents (e.g. reconnaissance drones, industrial robots in car assembly line)? The WG should either enumerate all possible agent sub-types (an impractical approach) or just model Agent only without any sub-types. The WG does not explicitly model all possible sub-types of Activity - why should a different approach be adopted for Agent?

Thanks.

Best,
Satya

Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 01:58:10 UTC