Re: Some thoughts about the revised provenance Model document

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 10:34, Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@zoo.ox.ac.uk> wrote:


> Rather than "lifetime of the account", why not "Lifetime of the entity
> described."  Unless I've missed something, this discussion is entirely about
> statements made directly or indirectly about a prov:Entity, which by it's
> nature is completely static or somehow constrained in its existence.

Because you might not be able to group non-provenance assertions by
entities - several prov:Entity instances might have been located in
the same (RDF-wise) Berlin - and then anything said about Berlin
should be true for all such entities.

Also an Entity could outlive an account - for instance Berlin and
Klaus still exists, and so does his paperweight described by :e2 - but
would :e2 no longer exist if Klaus ceases to be mayor of Berlin?
(Perhaps that is the definition of :e2 - or it is just an incidental
fact) When comparing two different accounts with different timespans
these kind of questions would come up.



I believe Jim's proposal is easier to deal with for someone producing
the account, when deciding if some information should be included or
not, but does raise the question of "what is the time period the
account is valid for" - this is not necessarily continuous, but must
cover all the events that have been described, such as
wasGeneratedBy(), used(), etc.


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester

Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 14:17:16 UTC