Re: entity invalidation

On Apr 17, 2012, at 12:13 PM, Luc Moreau wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Following last week's teleconference, Paul, Paolo, Tim and I have revisited the proposal on
> invalidation.
> 
> Your feedback would be useful. Can you express in the usual way if you support it? and if not, what
> issue you have this proposal.
> 
> If there is support, we would like to consider this section as part of the prov-dm release, provided
> that we can also adjust prov-o and prov-n.
> 
> Regards,
> Luc
> 
> 
> 
> [1] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/working-copy/wd5-prov-invalidation.html
> 
> -- 
> Professor Luc Moreau
> Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
> University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
> Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
> United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm



This meets with my general expectation and approval.

I'm concerned about the notation of wasInvalidatedBy(), 
currently --

   wasInvalidatedBy([id,]e[,a][,t][,attrs])

It seems to me that optional components are best reflected by 
an empty position when left out -- 

   wasInvalidatedBy([id], e, [a], [t], [attrs])


Thus, when the optional id is left out, as in the first example, 
the notation should read --

   wasInvalidatedBy( , ex:The-Painter, ex:crash, 
   1998-09-02, [ex:circumstances="plane accident"])

Relatedly, I'm not familiar enough with this notation style 
to say whether the above is more or less incorrect than the
second example --

   wasInvalidatedBy(ex:bbcNews2012-04-03,-,2012-04-03T23:59:59)

Note the lack of spaces following the commas, and the hyphen 
signifying the omitted [a] ...

The latter string is much harder for a human (the intended 
audience of this notation) to parse, and the spaces are invalid 
within identifiers and timestamps, so I think they are good to 
have (and therefore I've included them in my revised primitive).

Niggling inconsistencies like this are painful to find and fix, 
but vital to the success of docs like we're producing here.

Regards,

Ted



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