Re: modeling macted's example

Hello Paul,

It makes sense to me, and I could accept it. It matches what I
understand to be the three-level view discussed.

On the other hand, it may not matter that the account can change as
long as the provenance assertions about it stay true. So I could also
be happy with a two-level view in which the following is valid:
  wasGeneratedBy(acc1, emailing)

The PROV-DM spec says "an entity [is] an identifiable characterized
thing. An entity fixes some aspects of a thing and its situation in
the world, so that it becomes possible to express its provenance, and
what causes these specific aspects to be as such."

We can say that acc1 is identifiable, it is characterised, it is a
thing, and it is possible to express its provenance, so it is an
entity. It is only distinct in that it is not a specialisation of some
other entity, and is characterised merely by being that account. It is
in it's nature as an entity that we can express it's provenance using
PROV-DM.

Both two and three-level views seem OK to me, but the two-level view
might be less confusing to explain. Following MacTed's terms in the
telecon, we could say: data is something you can express the
provenance of, provenance is metadata, but metadata is also itself
data.

Thanks,
Simon

On 27 January 2012 17:28, Paul Groth <p.t.groth@vu.nl> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I thought I would take a go at modeling part of MacTed's provenance of
> provenance example.
>
> Here's the description "i have a table, built in 1727 by joe smith ..."
> I would model this in prov dm as:
>
> entity(table)
> wasGeneratedBy(table, built, 1727)
> activity(built)
> wasAssociatedWith(built,joe smith)
>
> Now to talk about the provenance of that provenance (generated by an
> email activity), I think I would do the following:
>
> acccount(acc1,
>     entity(table)
>     wasGeneratedBy(table, built, 1727)
>     activity(built)
>     wasAssociatedWith(built,joe smith)
> )
>
> entity(acc_entity_id, [perspectiveOn=acc1])
> wasGeneratedBy(acc_entity_id, emailing)
>
> To me we can't just say
>
> wasGeneratedBy(acc1, emailing) because the account may change and also
> different people may take different perspectives on the account. So we
> need to do a "freezing" operation thus making it into an entity. Then we
> can talk about it's provenance.
>
> Thoughts?
> Paul
>



-- 
Dr Simon Miles
Lecturer, Department of Informatics
Kings College London, WC2R 2LS, UK
+44 (0)20 7848 1166

Provenance-based Validation of E-Science Experiments:
http://eprints.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/1268/

Received on Friday, 27 January 2012 18:03:32 UTC