Re: ACTION-91: comment regarding completeness

On Jun 8, 2012, at 11:43 AM, Paolo Missier wrote:

> Tim
> 
> <snip>
> On 6/8/12 4:26 PM, Timothy Lebo wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 8, 2012, at 11:19 AM, Paolo Missier wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> "The attribute complete is optional. It is interpreted as follows:
>>>>> - if it is present and set to true, then c is known to include all and only the members specified in the key-entity-set.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> ^^^ This kind of "future proofing" is what raised the "completeness concerns", so I suggest toning this down.
>>>> As I've said before, avoiding the OWA's "anything can come down the road" and instead focusing on "this is believed to be true, according to the asserter" eases the completeness objections.
>>> 
>>> no problems with that, but as I pointed out in past discussions on this, this is true in general for /all/ provenance assertions, not just collections... right?
>> 
>> I guess so.
>> Which is why we don't have a "complete" flag on Entity, right?
> rather, on relations:
> 
> wasDerivedFrom(e,a,...) 
> 
> is believed to be true by the asserter /and at the time of the assertion/.
> We never really discussed what happens if tomorrow I find out that was not the case -- we barely managed to agree that your observations and mine need not be consistent, and we agreed that consistency is out of scope.
> 
> so that's where I think the OWA discussion should be situated.
> 
> regarding the specific "complete" flag issue,  I thought we had already concluded that, for the specific case of collection membership, the "complete" flag is nothing but syntactic sugar for insertion into an empty collection (or dictionary).

So I'm not trying to prolong the argument. Yesterday's call seemed to settle it.
I'm just trying to smooth out some potentially concerning phrasings, as  I pointed out.
So that this kind of concern can be avoided when future readers might "appreciate" OWA, they need to be informed that "yes, but that's what this is".

-Tim


> 
>> 
>> So what you're doing is saying "if you ever try to talk about _my_ dictionary, you're talking about a different dictionary!"?
> not sure I follow this?  if this is saying that provenance is relative to the observer and others have different views over "what happened" then yes, but again I think we have agreed (wisely, I should say)  not to go there.


I was just trying to understand how one could avoid "having anything added", where they'd basically say "my Entity is the kind that doesn't have any  more members, so if you find any others, those asserters made a mistake." Like, if someone added Paolo (or, the next justice) to my list of :todays-us-supreme court, they'd just be wrong and mis-interpreted what my Entity (Dictionary) is.

I'm not arguing, just trying to understand.

-Tim



> 
> --Paolo
>