Fwd: vocabulary simplification: two proposals to vote on [deadline, Oct 26 midnight, GMT]

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Begin forwarded message:

> From: Paolo Ncl <paolo.missier@newcastle.ac.uk>
> Date: 27 October 2011 09:32:41 GMT+01:00
> To: Jim McCusker <mccusj@rpi.edu>
> Cc: Luc Moreau <l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, Provenance Working Group WG <public-prov-wg@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: vocabulary simplification: two proposals to vote on [deadline, Oct 26 midnight, GMT]
> 

> Jim
> 
>> 
>> I'm not clear on why "activity" was settled on as the simplest term.
>> The root "act" is far less ambiguous, even though it too suffers from
>> implied agency. Shouldn't we be opening this up to other suggestions?
> 
> I did ask those who objected to propose an alternative. 
> 
>> 
>> For instance, we can simplify the model by making Events either
>> instantaneous or not (which aligns with the common definition of
>> Event), and let Events be composites. Temporal events can be aligned
>> with time.owl, but the temporal aspect shouldn't be required (as it's
>> not required now).
> 
> I still object to changing the semantics of events. I don't know what you mean by common definition of event. I prefer tom stand by the CSP definition of events, which underpins process algebras (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes)
> 
> Events
> Events represent communications or interactions. They are assumed to be indivisible and instantaneous. They may be atomic names (e.g. on, off), compound names (e.g. valve.open, valve.close), or input/output events (e.g. mouse?xy, screen!bitmap).
> 
> We have more modestly encoded a small set of events, and these are certainly fundamentally distinct from processes.
> 
> Best, Paolo