Re: Provenance and observations and measurements

On 12/05/2011 20:56, martin wrote:

> Indeed. It was me who mentioned the measurements. I fully agree. In my
> follow-up e-mail,
> I described it as scientific observation. Geo-applications are indeed a
> huge area, may be
> with the most massive data production currently,
> 
> but there is also ecology, biodiversity, clinical studies, astronomy,
> experimental records in
> physics, chemistry, microbiology. Further there is archaeology, ethnology,
> experimental neurology, psychology, sociology, forensics...

I completely agree with all the above. There are some general forms of
"observation" and metadata around them that it'd be good to capture cleanly.

The point I was going to make on the conf call yesterday, before
discovering that I'd lost sound input, was that a lot of the discussions
relate to general notions of process: how data has been captured, and
then morphed since its capture. This is reminiscent of process-modeling
languages like BPMN [1], with the important differences that the process
concerned has happened in the past rather than being anticipated in the
future, and probably doesn't need to include detailed call-level
information of the sort encapsulated in traditional workflow descriptions.

It might be worth considering whether we can refer to an existing
process description language and use that to structure the provenance
information, rather than either (a) defining a new one or (b)
abstracting-away from process too far. From the perspective of my own
interests, I think structuring around an abstract description of the
dataflow process would make things clean and simple, as long as we can
also devise a way to support more global, non-process-dependent queries
too. These two goals may be in complete contradiction :-)

[1]
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Business_Process_Modeling_Notation

Cheers,


-- 
-- Simon

Please note my new email address: from now on I
will be using simon.dobson@st-andrews.ac.uk

Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 11:58:46 UTC