Re: PROV-ISSUE-94 (pe-attributes): are process executions characterized in the same way as entities? [Conceptual Model]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:21, Simon Miles <simon.miles@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:

> Is there similar need for process executions to have characterising
> attributes, or is it just making the standard more complex?

I had a thought this morning that process executions as entities can
be useful to cover the idea of nested process executions as well. So
for instance in my workflow example there is a overall PE for
executing the workflow, which is composed of individual PEs for each
service invocation - which in theory could have even deeper PEs
detailing the command line invocations.


The definitions of complementOf in
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/ProvenanceModel.html#expression-complement-of
seem to apply to this case.

This somewhat solves the question if an entity can be generated by
several PEs - you can say "Yes, but only if there is a complementOf
relationship between PEs".

If we don't go for this, then I would still want to propose a similar
property to relate two such process executions. It could just be that
the overall PE is "using" its children - but then we no longer
distinguish between data and process - perhaps that is a good thing.


You will also have a start and end-time of the Process Execution. Now
we do don't have a formal to attach these to entities at the moment
(Except start is related to when the Generation happened, and the
mention of "characterization intervals" and events which is never used
in the abstract syntax).


However I am not sure about the entity properties for PEs - which
properties would be "partially dependent" on each other in the case of
two process executions?

Let's say we have two PEs which are  a complementOf PE - they could be
complementary views of the same overall process, for instance PE1 can
have { location: "Factory" } and PE2 can have { location: "Warehouse"
} - both part of the overall PE describing how the product came appear
in a box in a shop.


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

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2011 14:27:45 UTC