Comments on the Prov Primer

Reading http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-prov-primer-20120724/, some comments. Nothing major...

- The wrong pattern was used in the status section: it says "This document is intended to become a W3C Recommendation." which, I believe, is not the case. There is a separate entry for notes in recspec ("WD-NOTE") (hopefully that works, but maybe it does not, in which case we should talk to Robin:-)

- Right after 2.2 there is a 'Use' word standing alone… Looking at the HTML source it says <p>Use</section> :-(

- Last sentence in 2.4: "PROV , the agent" -> "PROV, the agent"

- Diagrams right before 3.2 (and, actually, all other diagrams): I think it would be better to use diagrams where the CURIE labels are on one line. After all, these are URI-s, even if in an abbreviated form, whereas the diagram does not really make that clear… It is also more in line with the Turtle/Prov-n codes.

- (I am not sure how to handle this optimally) When reading section 3.3, and looking at the prov-n example at the end, I found 

wasGeneratedBy(ex:chart1, ex:illustrate, -)

and I was wondering (not being familiar with the prov-n syntax) what the '-' character meant. It is only way later (in section 3.8) that I realized that the slot is used for a time value and '-', I presume, means 'not specified'. Maybe it is worth putting some sort of a forward reference into 3.3. to help the poor reader…

- Again as a newcomer… in 3.6 I was a little bit puzzled by the 

    ex:chart2 prov:wasDerivedFrom ex:dataSet2 

statement. What I mean is: it is fine if I look at 'wasDerivedFrom' as a very high level statement stating the origin of one entity in terms of the other (is that a correct interpretation?) but, then, why don't I have also

    ex:chart1 prov:wasDerivedFrom ex:dataSet1 ?

What drew my attention on that was looking at the complete figure in 3.10 and noting the assymetry in the figure. After all, ex:chart2 is created exactly through the same steps as ex:chart1 (illustrate-composition-compose-data) except that using a different data set, and that does not show at all.

(I guess representing this symmetry might become a bit hairy but may be worth noting in the text that these could be done as well.)

Maybe it is a possibility to introduce the wasDerivedFrom in the very first part of the text, making it clear that we can have such very high level relationships among entities.

- It may be worth making the turtle and prov-n files available via links in 3.10. People may want to use that as a copy-paste example for their own usage, for example…

- In references: for all entries spaces are missing between the authors' list and the title. Eg, "Paul GrothPROV-AQ".

I hope this helps!

Cheers

Ivan

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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 14:53:00 UTC