- From: Simon Miles <simon.miles@kcl.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:19:30 +0100
- To: Provenance Working Group WG <public-prov-wg@w3.org>
Hello Paul, I wholeheartedly support the efforts on simplifying the specifications now that we have first working drafts. Sorry I couldn't join the last telecon where this was apparently discussed. In case it wasn't already said, we have to be careful that there are two kinds of simplification being discussed, and your blog post concerns only the first below. (1) Allowing people to say things succinctly when those things are, from their perspective, basic. (2) Saying less in the specifications, introducing fewer concepts and/or with less complex language. As long as we don't have too many "basic" types of statements, there shouldn't be too much of a conflict between the two. I'm still not clear why summarisation is considered basic or something people will often want to assert, but don't particularly object. It would help (me) to understand the scope of or use cases behind what is considered basic enough to warrant it's own shortcut. (2) may conflict with the coverage of the specification's concepts, which we might argue is needed to allow interoperability (e.g. we 'need' entity attributes, we 'need' accounts, we 'need' agents, etc.) But our specifications can't provide complete interoperability by themselves, however expressive they are, as there will always be domain-specific information expressed by one system/person that another needs to interpret for the provenance to make sense. So, being expressive enough to allow interoperability is a matter of degree, and if the specifications (DM and OM) are currently too complex, we may be trying to be too expressive. In some cases, we might reduce what we say by 'allowing' for the expressivity required for interoperability, rather than saying how it would be expressed ourselves, e.g. we don't say how you must assert that something is an agent, but allow for that to be standardised as a supplement to Prov-DM. I realise this is rather abstract, and I'll try to come up with concrete suggestions soon. Thanks, Simon On 23 October 2011 09:43, Paul Groth <p.t.groth@vu.nl> wrote: > Hi All, > > I wrote a post at the Semantic Web Activity News blog about how to > write down some simple provenance statements using PROV-DM > > http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2011/10/23/5-simple-provenance-statements/ > > Hopefully, this is useful not only for the outside world but to us as well. > > cheers, > Paul > > -- Dr Simon Miles Lecturer, Department of Informatics Kings College London, WC2R 2LS, UK +44 (0)20 7848 1166
Received on Tuesday, 25 October 2011 15:19:58 UTC