Re: Blog Post: 5 Simple Provenance Statements

Hi all,
Some comments inline:

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Simon Miles <simon.miles@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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.
>
> I strongly agree with taking a "minimal common" approach to incorporate
only those provenance terms that we believe can be used across domains. I
understand that it will be a tight-rope walk to balance how much we should
model in the "basic" specification and not include shortcuts that may be
domain-specific.

Thanks.

Best,
Satya



> 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
>
>