PROV-ISSUE-381 (jzhao): Feedback and refactoring suggestion to prov-o section 3.2 [PROV-O HTML]

PROV-ISSUE-381 (jzhao): Feedback and refactoring suggestion to prov-o section 3.2 [PROV-O HTML]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/381

Raised by: Jun Zhao
On product: PROV-O HTML

Dear prov-o team and all,

Here are some of my feedback based on reading the latest draft at https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/ontology/Overview.html, yesterday afternoon.

Please do not take my feedback as a criticism to the excellent by whoever worked on this section. This issue is meant to keep notes of some of things need to be updated due to the ontology updates, and also help make the spec more accessible to readers.

I am happy to help address some of the refactor suggestions I raised here if we could draw some consensus as a group.

Cheers,

Jun

===============
Housekeeping issues:
1) I think prov:Notes, prov:hasAnnotations are no longer in the ontology any more. These need to be updated in both the text and examples?

2) first paragraph: prov:AlternateOf -> prov:alternateOf

=== Refactoring suggestions ===

My suggestions of refactoring are in the line of helping readers to quickly grasp what we can offer in this category.

The first few paragraphs in the current draft are in a good direction of summarizing the different types of expanded terms we have. I wonder whether we can bring even a bit more structure into the introduction part of the section.

I am organizing the current expanded terms in my mind in the following categories:

- More specific terms: which is basically what the 1st paragraph says. But I'll also put the sub-properties of prov:tracedTo there, including prov:tracedTo, prov:hadOriginalSource, prov:wasRevisionOf, prov:wasQuotedFrom.

- Provenance of dynamic resources: which are what prov:specializationOf and prov:alternateOf are about?

- Provenance of provenance: prov:Accounts?

- Additional descriptions: we only have prov:Location now?

- Miscellaneous: prov:generated, prov:wasStartedBy, prov:wasEndedBy. I don't see them as specialization of any starting-point terms.

I am sure my categorisation looks provocative to a lot of you and I am ready to follow on discussions:)

=== Refactoring examples ===
Some examples are a bit long, and are not going directly to demonstrate how the expanded terms can be used. And we should also be careful that we are writing a spec of the ontology, not a how-to guide. 

I am referring to the examples based on the order of their appearance in the spec.

==== Example 1 ====
- Can we remove some of the setting-up-the-scene provenance statements? 
- Can we highlight usage of expanded terms in bold font, if we are allowed to do so? 
- We also need to revise this example according to the ongoing discussions in a different internal thread.

==== Example 2 ==== 
1) The theme of the example seems to show off the different types of prov:tracedTo. But it did not show the difference between prov:tracedTo and prov:wasDerivedFrom. By some annotations in the example or explicit statement? 

2) I am not sure about the example of prov:hadOriginalSource. The current example does not show me how it is hugely different from what prov:wasDerivedFrom. DM says that prov:hadOriginalSource is meant to bring some sense of attribution to the source entity, such as a new paper is based on existing data shared by other scientists. Can we revise the example or make it clearer?

3) We need prefix to prov-o properties and concepts in this example.

==== Example 3 ====
Is this about Notes or Accounts? IMO, the example needs to be enriched or removed. Should we also say what RDF syntax we should to express Accounts?

==== Example TBD ====

We don't have expanded explanation of prov:wasStartedBy and prov:wasEndedBy. In the recent discussions we revealed there there were a lot of different "trigger" scenarios:
- started by a person / agent;
- started by an entity;
- started by an activity.

Either an example or additional text is needed. 

One more sentence to say that prov:generated is an inverse of prov:wasGeneratedBy? Copy the nice sentence in the ontology annotation: This inverse of prov:wasGeneratedBy is defined so that Activities being described can reference their generated outputs directly without needing to 'stop' and start describing the Entity. This helps 'Activity-centric' modeling as opposed to 'Entity-centric' modeling.?

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2012 11:15:25 UTC