Re: PROV-ISSUE-337 (agent-and-entity): agent should not be a subclass of entity [prov-dm]

Hi all,

Agents are no longer a subclass of entity.


The text currently says:
  An agent MAY be a particular type of entity or activity.


Instead, I am proposing that we write:
  An agent MAY be a particular type of entity or activity.


In other words, the proposal is that Agent and Activity are not disjoint 
classes.
This offers flexibility to asserters.  I don't think there has been a 
strong case
for making those classes disjoint.

Thoughts?

Luc


On 04/02/2012 10:53 PM, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:
> PROV-ISSUE-337 (agent-and-entity): agent should not be a subclass of entity [prov-dm]
>
> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/337
>
> Raised by: Luc Moreau
> On product: prov-dm
>
> Currently, prov-dm defines agent as follows:
>
> An agent is a type of entity that bears some form of responsibility for an activity taking place. An agent is a particular type of Entity. This means that the model can be used to express provenance of the agents themselves.
>
> While it is nice to be able to express the provenance of agents, it is not obvious to me that agents should always be entities.  In fact, they could be activities.
>
> Consider a collaboration activity, to which several agents ag1, ag2, ..., agn are associated. Why can't we see it as an agent too?
> activity(collaboration)
> wasAssociatedWith(collaboration,agi,contract)
>
> agent(collaboration)
> wasAttributed(nice-piece-of-work,collaboration)
>
>
> So, I would propose the following alternative definition:
>
>
> An agent is something that bears some form of responsibility for an activity taking place.
>
> A given agent may be a particular type of Entity or Activity. This means that the model can be used to express provenance of the agents themselves.
>
>
> Looking at prov-o, I notice that they have already defined an agent as subclass of owl:Thing.
>
>
>
>
>    

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2012 15:04:21 UTC