Simple provenance? (Was: domain of the qualifiedDelegation property?)(

This issue and comment reminded me of a proposal in the SWORD specification to 
define an on-behalf-of header for use with HTTP.  This in turn reminded me about 
Paul's blog about simple provenance statements 
(http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2011/10/23/5-simple-provenance-statements/).

I think many of us have noticed a tension in our work, between the need to 
express provenance in easy-to-capture ways, and to convey a model of 
interconnected provenance that does not lose any captured information, which is 
necessarily more complex.  There has been some discussion of having a small 
number of "short-circuit" provenance properties that can be mapped automatically 
to more fully articulated provenance model expressions.  But I fear this may not 
entirely address the problem, but add some confusion about how to express 
provenance by providing "blessed" alternatives.

Is this a problem we should face head-on?  And if so, how?  My current thinking 
is that a "best practices" document (part of primer?) might discuss patterns of 
commonly-used simple provenance statements, and explain how these are usefully 
mapped to the fully-articulated provenance model so they are more easily 
exchanged and processed without loss of information.

Maybe something to think about when we have some more implementation experience?

#g
--


On 20/01/2012 15:28, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:
>
> PROV-ISSUE-226 (dgarijo): domain of the qualifiedDelegation property? [Ontology]
>
> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/226
>
> Raised by: Daniel Garijo
> On product: Ontology
>
> actedOnBehalfOf is a n-ary relationship, since you can relate 2 agents and an activity. I have named the n-ary relationship "Delegation", since (as Khalid suggested), it implies the notion of responsability between 2 agents.
>
> All the other qualifiedInvolvements have as domain an activity. We could have the activity as domain for qualifiedDelegation too, but in this case the activity is optional, so it might not be the best approach.
>
> If we decide that the domain is an Agent, then we would need a "hadQualifiedActivity" property to link the optional activity which one of the agents is controlling on behalf of the other. The second agent could be linked with the existent hadQualifiedEntity.
>
> Summary: if we choose the first option, it would be a wrong modeling IMO. If we choose the second option, we would need an extra property and now one of the qualified involvements would have Agents as domain. I've commited the delegation section in the html doc, but without any examples until we agree on this.
> Thoughts?
>
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 23 January 2012 10:41:33 UTC