Re: ProvenanceContainer (Re: Workflow Example in Formal Model HTML document)

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 10:26, Luc Moreau <L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> It's a good point, inline with mine below (not used to make a representation
> of something in the world),
> and also echoed by James in his response to Satya.

Paolo (I think) mentioned yesterday that although you can describe an
apple as an prov:Entity - we don't make :Apple a subclass of
prov:Entity. Similarly, although we might in some cases be talking
about a provenance container as a prov:Entity,  we don't make
prov:ProvenanceContainer a subclass of prov:Entity - we've not
invented a new owl:Thing which every class will subclass.

So although it might sound from the prov:Entity description that
"almost anything" can be a characterized thing in the world, it does
not mean that you have to do it. You would only do it where it would
make sense for the purpose of tracing provenance, in which case a
particular instance becomes a prov:Entity.

(I assume however that it should be fine to create subclasses of
prov:Entity which are always used to describe provenance entities, for
instance wf:Value in my workflow example).


It might be worth modifying the conceptual model to highlight what is
the purpose of describing an Entity. Initially we had the formulation
along the lines of "Something which we want to assert the provenance
of" - which is somewhat the intention, but might seem to exclude
entities which are only prov:used or controlling a PE.


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

Received on Thursday, 29 September 2011 09:47:48 UTC