Bundles and PROV-AQ (Issue 596)

Cf. http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/596

At the face-to-face meeting we agreed that detailed treatment of bundles is out 
of scope for PROV-AQ, which deals specifically with provenance descriptions 
associated with resources.

But in later discussion, Paul raised the question of whether we should say 
*anything* about what happens on dereferencing a bundle URI.

It's possible that sentence about this would not be out of order in section 1.4 
(http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/tip/paq/prov-aq.html#uri-types-and-dereferencing). 
  I'm thinking that something along the following lines might be helpful to some:

[[
The notion of provenance bundles for a named set of provenance descriptions is 
introduced in [PROV-DM] (section 5.4.1 - 
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/tip/paq/prov-aq.html#uri-types-and-dereferencing). 
  This specification is mainly concerned with accessing the provenance 
descriptions associated with entities, without regard to the bundles in which 
they occur.

But bundles too may be retrievable entities.  Given a URI for a bundle, 
dereferencing that URI should yield a representation of the bundle; this might 
be a PROV-N document [[PROV-N]], a serialization of an RDF dataset 
[[RDF1.1-concepts]] 
(https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-concepts/index.html#section-dataset) 
or some other representation that collects several named provenance descriptions 
into a single entity.
]]

What this does not say is how to locate a named provenance description within a 
bundle.  Without being far more specific about the format of a bundle 
representation, which I claim is out of scope for PROV-AQ, I don't think that is 
possible here.

#g
--

Tracker, this is ISSUE 596

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 14:39:45 UTC