Re: PROV-ISSUE-206: three proposals to vote on (deadline Jan 15th midnight GMT)

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 12:12, Luc Moreau <L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> As far as know, nobody has commented on the example.  If the example is not
> supported by the group, then we need to reconsider everything.

I also think the example is weak - modelling workflow subprocesses
brings up lots of other questions and interesting challenges (such as
my entities-generated-twice-problem).

> To me, there are lots of entities that start activities:
> - a unix signal activates a signal handler
> - an invoice in my mail box activates my paying of a bill
> - a message in my inbox activates a response activity

The Invoice is perhaps the best of these examples.

It would sound 'wrong' to say that billPaying was started by the mail
delivery activity or the mail man agent, as it probably would not
matter who or how the bill got delivered - if it was by flying doves
or pneumatic tube, you might not even know as you just see the bill in
your inbox.

So it sounds right that it was the existence of the invoice in your
box (i.e. a specialisation of the invoice-entity) that triggered the
billPaying activity.

If someone wonders why this did not happen earlier, then perhaps they
might want to check the provenance of the invoiceInMailbox entity to
see which activity generated it - this could be recorded in a
different account (like the internal mail log).


So can we rework this example to something which more likely would
require provenance recording? Say instead of an invoice, it is a
twitter message which says that the graphs in the published article
(journalism example) looks wrong. It does not matter much what is the
provenance of this tweet, who wrote it or even when it appeared - but
what is important is that this triggered a re-check of the data.


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

Received on Thursday, 19 January 2012 09:24:42 UTC