Re: Proposal for restructuring PROV-DM into core+extensions

What does it mean for something to be in an extension? This potentially has
consequences beyond just trying to make the documentation simpler, but can
in effect demote constructs that we have already voted on being in the
specification to something like a Note status. The number of items that
have been identified for exclusion from the core, and the fact that a large
chunk of them are, as you say, arguably should stay in, suggests that we
have kept things that might be extensions to a minimum, and that we
shouldn't bother trying to separate out what has already been agreed to be
kept in (often after a lot of work sorting out the details and
consequences).

Jim

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:13 AM, Graham Klyne <graham.klyne@zoo.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

> Following Thursday's telecon, I've done an initial cut of a proposal for
> rearranging PROV-DM material:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/**wiki/ProvDM_Proposal_for_**restructuring<http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ProvDM_Proposal_for_restructuring>
>
> I've added abstract to the document outline that try to capture the
> distinction/rationale for the proposed structure.
>
> For the most part, I find the distinction between essential structure and
> epistemic refinement has bene fairly easy to call, but there are,
> inevitably, a couple of areas where it's not so clear for me.
>
> (a) wasInformedBy and wasStartedByActivity - I think these are both
> instances of an (as yet) unstated parent structure, which one might call
> "wasInfluencedBy" - i.e. any effect of one activity on another activity.
>  My choice would be to have this new property in the core, and
> wasInformedBy and wasStartedByActivity as refinements (i.e.extensions)
>
> (b) wasInvalidatedBy - in terms of capturing the essence of a provenance
> trace, this seems of secondary importance, but it does seem to be the
> natural counterpart for wasGeneratedBy so I've left it in core for now.
>
> (c) entity specializationOf and alternateOf.  These could be argued to be
> purely structural, but I felt that they aren't essential to representing a
> provenance trace, and they are sufficiently tricky that I didn't want to
> risk the potential distraction of including them in the core.
>
> In drawing up this proposal, I have tried to focus on reorganizing
> existing material.  Separately from that, I think there are a number of
> possible improvements, some of which wouldbe facilitated by the
> reorganization.
>
> I've also included in the core some of the auxilliary material that I
> think is needed to properly explain the core data model constructs
> (attributes, values, etc.) and have included it further to the front than
> in the current document, under "Preliminaries".
>
> #g
>
>


-- 
Jim McCusker
Programmer Analyst
Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics
Yale School of Medicine
james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330
http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu

PhD Student
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
mccusj@cs.rpi.edu
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