PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm]

PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/230

Raised by: Graham Klyne
On product: prov-dm

The PROV-DM draft introduces name scoping, particularly with respect to Accounts.

I think this is the wrong concept, as it tries to use name-scoping to capture different provenance accounts about the same entity.  I think that an entity id should refer to the same Entity wherever it occurs.  What may vary between accounts is the claims that are made about that entity.  Without this, I see no basis for comparing accounts.

For PROV-DM, I imagine one one might say that the account+local id together form the common identifier (ala compound key), but then I think some additional mechanism would then be needed to link names from different accounts.

When the names used are URIs, then I think that the notion of scoping is entirely wrong.  URIs are, by design, a *global* namespace, and it creates confusion (or worse) of one allows a URI to denote different things.  Personally, I would not prescribe the form of names used by the DM; the use of URIs is a syntactic matter, and as such it could be introduced for ASN.

I see the DM as an "abstract syntax" in the sense proposed by John McCarthy, where the terms and productions have the form of logical predicates, and in particular a "name" is distinguished simply as a predicate "Name(id)" which is True iff "id" is a name.  This avoids any need to prescribe the actual form of referenced by the DM.

Received on Monday, 30 January 2012 11:01:21 UTC