Review Prov-AQ document

Hello all,

Below, you can find my review of the PROV-AQ document. It is a good  
document and I consider it ready for publication as public working  
draft. Thumbs up for the editors.

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PROV-AQ Review

The document gives a good description of the access and query  
mechanisms for provenance information. It is well structured and  
easily understandable, including the service specification. I propose  
to make a it available as public working draft.

I have some concerns and remarks, but they should not stop the  
publication of the document as public working draft. I raise no  
issues, but if the remarks are considered relevant, feel free to do so.

I propose one addition:

I would consider the ability to do round-trips (Going from the  
resource to its provenance information and back to the resource.) When  
provenance information is accessed using the HTTP protocol, the  
response of the accessed provenance infromation must then also include  
an HTTP header denoting the the subject of the provenance information.  
E.g. Link: target-URI; rel="isProvenanceFor"; anchor="provenance-uri".  
The same can be done for provenance information accessed via REST  
services or resources represented in HTML or RDF. Maybe there is a  
good reason not to do this, but then I would include this motivation  
into the document.

I propose some modifications:

Section 1.1: The term resource needs some clarification. I would  
indicate that a resource can be: an information resource or a  
non-information resource. (This already implies that the resource URI  
can be dereferencable or not.) This makes explicit that provenance can  
be recorded for non-information resources (e.g. a person) and for  
information resources (e.g. an RDF representation of that person or an  
HTML representation of that person, etc.)

Section 3.4: Composite object-packaging formats. ORE and MPEG-21 DIDL  
are usually not packaged into ZIP archives, their datastreams  
sometimes are for storage reasons. BagIt is a sort of  
`self-descriptive` ZIP archive by specification, meant to be  
transmitted over the Web (e.g. it includes checksum information of the  
included datastreams for validation after transmission). Also Mets  
might be considered more relevant these days then MPEG-21 DIDL in the  
digital library and archive community.

Section 4.2: ..., defined by the provenance ontology [PROV-O]. The  
specified RDF object properties, e.g., prov:ProvenanceService, are at  
this moment not specified by PROV-O. Thus, PROV-O and PROV-AQ are out  
of sync.

Section 7: ... secure HTTP (https) should be used. Why `should`?  
Shouldn`t this be `may`, and if not, why? Now it seems provenance  
information should always be retrieved using https.

Some spelling corrections:

Section 3.2: The target-uri given by the anchor link element specifies  
an identifier for the document ... instead of ...specifies an  
specifies an identifier ...

Received on Friday, 20 April 2012 16:22:28 UTC