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

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:01, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker
<sysbot+tracker@w3.org> wrote:

> 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.


.. including the belief that the given entity describes the same thing.

In practical forms - two accounts might both be using
<http://www.example.com/> as the entity identifier - but one of them
is talking about the website at <http://www.example.com/> as it is
today, and the other about the company <http://www.example.com/>.

This is a classical challenge on the semantic web, but all PROV needs
to say is that within an account, the entity describes the same thing.
Across accounts, two entities with the same identifier might or might
not characterize the same thing - but the two asserters are at least
attempting to say they are the same thing, by using the same
identifier. If we say they are always the same thing, then that might
give various consequences.

You say that URIs are a global namespace, which is true, but it is not
easily determinable for a given URI what it actually represents. You
can request it, and hopefully get a (redirect to) a representation,
but you still don't know what 'thing' it is, just some kind of
characterisation of the resource.

Are you saying that a PROV account of a particular entity, made in
2012 by asserter X, must be compatible with whatever resolving the
entity's URI in 2020 will tell us about the resource? Or with what the
entity's URI might have resolved to in 2012? As requested by whom,
how?



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

Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 11:45:20 UTC