RE: PROV-ISSUE-630 (prov-sem-fpwd-review): PROV-SEM review for FPWD [Formal Semantics]

Hello James,

Thanks for the document. Here's my review.

1.  Is the purpose of the document clear and consistent with the working group's consensus about the semantics?

Yes.


2.  Are there minor issues that can be corrected easily prior to FPWD release?

You refer to "PROV instance" a few times. Should this be "PROV document"?

In the grammar at the start of Sec 2.4 (and at least once later), why have Collection and EmptyCollection got prov: prefixes unlike any other term?

Typo in Remark in Section 3.2.1: "forthe"

Section 3.2.1: "An entity is a kind of object... the entity does not record a fixed value for a" - doesn't sound right. What does it mean for an object to record something?

Section 3.2.3: I notice that the description of agents does not refer to responsibility, which is the key concept in DM.

Typo in Section 3.2.4.1: In line 1 of the definition, "if and only of evt"

The precedes relation does not appear correctly in my browser (other symbols render fine).


3.  Are there blocking issues that must be addressed prior to release as a first public working draft?

No.


4.  Are there non-blocking, but important issues that should be discussed and resolved for future editions? (no need to list TODOs already reflected in the document itself, unless there is disagreement about how to resolve them).

Section 3.2.4: You say that Events and Associations may overlap, but the function type() seems to preclude that: if an interaction is in Associations, it has type association, but that is not an allowed type for a member of Events?

Section 3.3.1: "linking each derivation to its path" - I'm not clear why a derivation maps to just one path.

A lot of Section 4 seems to be making "obvious" connections between structures and the relations of Section 3. Might the amount of text obscure the parts that are most interesting and not necessarily intuitive, e.g. in the definitions of precise derivation (single step derivation path), specialization and alternate (common things between entities)? Could these special features of the semantics be highlighted in some way?

thanks,
Simon

Dr Simon Miles
Senior Lecturer, Department of Informatics
Kings College London, WC2R 2LS, UK
+44 (0)20 7848 1166

Automatically Adapting Source Code to Document Provenance
http://eprints.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/1397/
________________________________
From: James Cheney [jcheney@inf.ed.ac.uk]
Sent: 25 February 2013 13:52
To: Provenance Working Group
Subject: Re: PROV-ISSUE-630 (prov-sem-fpwd-review): PROV-SEM review for FPWD [Formal Semantics]

Just to say that I forgot to put a link to the document below.  It is at:

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/semantics/prov-sem.html

However, I've noticed there are problems with the math formula rendering.  This seems to be because MathJax is only available using http:// urls while we need to use https:// for JavaScript.  A long-term fix may be to host the MathJax scripts somewhere locally on w3.org<http://w3.org> so that we can reference them with a https:// url.

The workaround for now is for me to save it locally after all of the mathematical formulas have been replaced (which is how we will build the final version too just like with all respec-based documents).  So please review this version:

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/semantics/prov-sem-review-20130226.html

--James



On Feb 25, 2013, at 12:50 PM, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org<mailto:sysbot+tracker@w3.org>> wrote:

PROV-ISSUE-630 (prov-sem-fpwd-review): PROV-SEM review for FPWD [Formal Semantics]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/630

Raised by: James Cheney
On product: Formal Semantics

Hi,

I have completed a cleanup pass on the semantics.  There are definitely still (mostly clearly-marked) areas where work is needed.

Satya, Simon, Paolo, and Khalid had indicated willingness to review by Thursday, so that we can vote on release with other documents as part of the PR release cycle.

Please respond to this issue with comments so that they are tracked.

Review questions:

1.  Is the purpose of the document clear and consistent with the working group's consensus about the semantics?  If not, can you suggest clarifications or improvements?

2.  Are there minor issues that can be corrected easily prior to FPWD release?

3.  Are there blocking issues that must be addressed prior to release as a first public working draft?

4.  Are there non-blocking, but important issues that should be discussed and resolved for future editions? (no need to list TODOs already reflected in the document itself, unless there is disagreement about how to resolve them).

--James