Re: PROV-ISSUE-8: defining generation in terms of `IVPT of'

Stian,
I agree with your comments, except for one thing:

  The asserter has made *assertions*. The asserter may or may not have 
observed the events; it may be hearsay, it may be inference.

But otherwise, I thought that the idea of perspective was capturing what 
you describe.  Doesn't it?

Cheers,
Luc



On 06/10/2011 01:26 PM, Stian Soiland-Reyes wrote:
>
> This seems to bring up again the notion of an Observer. The asserter 
> has made *observations* of the egg going in and out of the hot
> water, and knows about the *process* of "boiling an egg" and his 
> intentions of eating it.
>
> Another (occasional) observer might only have observed the egg being 
> taken out of the fridge and it put in cold water, and later that it 
> was on a plate. He might assert that the egg has been in water, and 
> might suggest the process is just rinsing.
>
> (I'm not suggesting scientists don't know what procedure they are 
> using, just that it might be loosely or wrongly defined)
>
> I think this touches on Identify as well. Your observations and 
> provenance assertions are affected by your views of "what the thing 
> is". If your view is that "the egg" is food, you care about how it was 
> prepared and perhaps if the hen was free ranging. Your "egg identity" 
> includes the egg as it appears cooked on the plate without egg shell.
>
> As a biologist you care about how the egg was formed and play a role 
> in reproduction, and would consider boiling and removing the shell a 
> destructive process yielding new parts which are no longer "an egg".
>
> So you might both make  observations and form a view of "the same 
> egg", but only for a restricted period of time. Remember that any 
> observation spans an interval, say the exposure time of a camera, 
> while the view spans a longer interval because of assumptions about 
> the object being in an expected state before, during and after the 
> observations. (intervals might have.varying accuracy)
>
> Later observations might contradict your earlier assumptions, of 
> course. It might be discovered that the yolk was solid and eggwhite 
> running, suggesting the egg had been exposed by microwaves.
>
> (I propose enough egg analogies for now!)
>
> On Jun 10, 2011 9:55 AM, "Luc Moreau" <L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk 
> <mailto:L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm