Re: PROV-AQ updates

Hello,

I finally found the time to read the documents, in particular PROV-AQ. I like 
it very much!!

In what follows, you find several comments and suggestions. Since all of them 
are minor, I didn't raise issues. If you think some of them should be raised, 
let me know which.

* Sec.3: "Provenance information may be provided by several parties other than 
the provider of the original resource, ..." -- It's not entirely clear what 
"the original resource" is. More precisely, what is lacking in this sentence 
is the relationship between "the original resource" and the provenance 
information. I propose to write: "Provenance information about a resource may 
be provided by several parties other than the provider of that resource, ..."

* Sec.3: "Once provenance information information is retrieved, one also needs 
to know how to locate the view of that resource within ..." -- This sentence 
contains "information" twice. More importantly, it's not clear what "that 
resource" refers to in this sentence. Hence, I propose to begin the sentence 
as follows: "Once provenance information about a resource is retrieved ..."

* Sec.3.1: "When used in conjunction [...] this HTTP header field indicates 
that provenance-URI is the URI of some provenance information associated with 
the requested resource and that the associated entity is identified as entity-
URI." -- Since there may be multiple entities associated with the requested 
resource (and, thus, multiple entity-URIs), I guess the implicit assumption of 
this sentence is the following: The entity referred to in a Link header field 
(via anchor="entity-URI") is the entity which is used for the requested 
resource in the provenance information referred to in the same Link header 
field. If that's correct, then we may want to make this assumption explicit by 
extending the sentence as follows: "... and that the associated entity is 
identified *within the referenced provenance information* as entity-URI."

* Sec.3.1.1 contains the TODO "It needs to be checked as to whether it is 
useful." -- I'm not sure how the usefulness may be checked but the proposal 
looks sound and reasonable to me.

* Sec.3.1.1: "There may be multiple provenance-service link header fields, and 
these may appear in the same document as provenance links ..." -- What does 
"the same document" refer to? Furthermore, I don't understand how a 
provenance-service link may appear as a provenance link.

* Sec.3.2: "The entity-URI given by the anchor link element specifies an 
identifier for the presented document view, and which may be used within the 
provenance information when referring to this document." -- What is "the 
presented document view"? I propose to adjust this sentence as follows: "... 
specifies an identifier for the entity that may be used within the provenance 
information when referring to the document."

* Sec.3.3: I assume the RDF properties introduced in this section 
(prov:hasProvenance, prov:hasAnchor, and prov:hasProvenanceService) may not 
only be used for the resource that is represented as RDF but also for any 
resource that the RDF representation describes. If that's true, we may want to 
add a corresponding comment to this section (although I understand that this 
is not the focus of this section).

* Sec.4, 3rd paragraph: "This approach may be preferred when the provenance 
service cannot specify the form of URIs used for identifying provenance 
information, or when there may be more than one source of provenance 
information known to the provenance service." -- While I understand the second 
case, I have no idea what the first case means.

* Sec.4.1.1, 3rd step: Since the important part of this step is not the use of 
the template but the generation of the provenance-locations-URI, I propose to 
rephrase the sentence as follows: "Form a provenance-locations-URI by using 
the provenance locations template with entity-URI as a substitute for template 
variable uri."

* Sec.4.1.1: "Any or all of *the* URIs in the ..."

* Sec.4.1.2: "To use [...], starting with [...] the URI of the resource or 
context (entity-URI)" -- Replace context by entity (as in Sec.4.1.1).

* Sec.4.1.2, 3rd step: Similar to Sec.4.1.1, I propose: "Form a provenance-URI 
by using the provenance information template with entity-URI as a substitute 
for template variable uri."

* Sec.4.2.1: "Dereferencing the service URI returns a representation of this 
service description." -- Better: "Dereferencing *a* service URI returns a 
representation of *such a* service description."

* Sec.4.2.2: "The examples below [...] and using the service description 
example above, its URI would be ..." -- "its URI" is misleading here because 
the URI is not the URI of the service description example. I propose: "The 
examples below [...] and using the service description example above. Hence, 
the URI of the corresponding provenance locations resource would be ..."

* Sec.6.1, step 1: I propose the following sentence instead: "For a given 
resource obtain its associated provenance-uri-1  and its associated entity-
uri-1 using ..."

* Sec.6.1, step 4: "... find its provenance-URI and continue from Step 1." -- 
It should be: "... from Step 2."

* Sec.6.1, step 4: I propose to change the Note to: "an HTTP HEAD request for 
entity-uri-2 may be used ..."

* Sec.6.1: "To reduce the overhead of multiple HTTP requests ..." -- I suggest 
to consider providing such prov:hasProvenance links as preferred practice and 
to adjust the paragraph accordingly.

Finally, it would be nice to link my name in the authors list to 
http://olafhartig.de  ;-)

Cheers,
Olaf


On Friday 06 January 2012 10:56:44 Graham Klyne wrote:
> All,
> 
> Yesterday, I made a number of updates to PROV-AQ, and corresponding issue
> tracker changes.  I was expecting the issue tracker to notify the WG list,
> but this hasn't happened.
> 
> Please see http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/products/5 for the current
> status of issues still open or pending review.
> 
> Older issues marked as pending review have been closed.
> 
> #g
> --

Received on Saturday, 7 January 2012 16:22:17 UTC