Re: Blog Post: 5 Simple Provenance Statements

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