Re: prov-dm attributes: two proposals to vote on (deadline Wednesday midnight GMT)

+1 to both.
Daniel

2011/11/2 Stian Soiland-Reyes <soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk>

> +1 to both proposals
>  On Oct 30, 2011 5:57 PM, "Luc Moreau" <l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> In the interest of simplification, we would like to make the following
>> proposal about attributes in prov-dm.
>>
>> Proposal 1: attributes are a necessary part of prov-dm. Attribute-value
>> pairs can be optionally
>>  included in Entity Expressions and Activity Expressions.
>>
>> The document will justify their presence along the following lines
>> (text to be worked on, suggestions welcome). For inter-operability
>> purpose, it is necessary to be able to describe entities (and
>> activities), and such descriptions need to be part of the provenance
>> record, so that queries over such descriptions can be expressed.  The
>> document will not make the distinction between non-characterizing and
>> characterizing attributes. All attributes will be considered as
>> describing some facet of the entity.
>>
>> Proposal 2: Constraints related to attributes will be dropped.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-**prov-dm-20111018/#derivation-**attributes<http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-prov-dm-20111018/#derivation-attributes>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-**prov-dm-20111018/#use-**attributes<http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-prov-dm-20111018/#use-attributes>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-**prov-dm-20111018/#generation-**
>> affects-attributes<http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-prov-dm-20111018/#generation-affects-attributes>
>>
>> Rationale: a number of issues have been raised against these
>> constraints. They may or may be fixable. But overall, they seem to
>> overconstraint the model, for benefits that are unclear.  There was no
>> intent to make them automatically verifiable, for
>> instance. Furthermore, if it is really crucial for some developers to
>> express that some attributes depend on others, than prov-dm already
>> offers a mechanism: simply model these attributes as entities, and their
>> dependency as derivation.
>>
>> A further consequence is that derivation can be made transitive!
>> (subject of a separate proposal)
>>
>> Finally, the semantics team may want to reconsider these constraints and
>> formalize them properly.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Luc
>>
>>
>>