Re: Provenance and observations and measurements

I absolutely agree that description of the past is different from controlling
events in the future - the classical problem in workflow and manufacturing. This is why
in the European Project 3D-COFORM and others we embed our provenance model (www.ics.forth.gr/isl/rdfs/3D-COFORM_CRMdig.rdfs) into the
CIDOC CRM, which is a generic model of the past in terms of discrete events in human scale. That allows
for nice inferences from provenance data in the narrower sense to related facts in
the wider context. We could reuse this framework successfully for cancer research, satellite data
and others.
The CIDOC CRM (ISO21127) contains 80 classes and 140 properties, but the
core model (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/docs/cidoc_crm_version_5.0.2.pdf, page iv and v),
is much smaller. There are also merges of DOLCE and CIDOC CRM. OPM can be mapped to the
CIDOC CRM.

I'd suggest to take a mapping of the concepts we are developping to some foundational or core ontolog(ies) into account,
to make sure that a thing like a publication process (see, e.g., http://www.cidoc-crm.org/rdfs/FRBR1.0.1_english_label.rdfs)
does not come up in dozens of ontologies in different form due to a different viewpoint.

Best,

martin

On 5/13/2011 2:57 PM, Simon Dobson wrote:
> 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,
>
>


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Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 14:00:13 UTC