Re: PROV-DICTIONARY internal review for first public working draft (ISSUE-614)

Hi,

firstly, thank you for putting this together so comprehensively.

Here are my responses and more specific comments:

On 16/01/2013 09:17, Tom De Nies wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Our apologies that this mail did not go out sooner. We had some trouble with our university mailing server, and couldn't send any
> mails anymore from our approved email addresses.
> I sent an email to the list from another address on Friday, but apparently it didn't get through.
>
> PROV-DICTIONARY is now ready for internal review.
> This document is on the NOTE track, and we'd like to publish a working draft by the time the RECs go to PR.
>
> The latest editor's draft is here: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/dictionary/prov-dictionary.html#dictionary-xml-schema
>
> The following people volunteered for reviewing the document: Paolo, Stian, James (maybe), Luc, and Paul, but others are also
> welcome to review of course.
> If you only have bandwidth to review part of the document (e.g. only the ontology section), that could be useful as well.
>
> Questions for reviewers
> - Is the notation of Dictionary concepts clear & acceptable for you? (in PROV-N, PROV-O and/or PROV-XML)
yes, provided the specific comments below are addressed
> - Are the constraints acceptable, or are they too loose/too strict?
acceptable
> -- In particular, can the constraint "IF derivedByRemovalFrom(d2, d1, {"k1"}) THEN hadDictionaryMember(d1, e1, "k1") " be dropped,
> or do you strongly support it?
I am for dropping it
> - Is the name PROV-DICTIONARY appropriate for the document?
yes
> - Can this be released as a first public working draft?
yes
> - If not, where are the blocking issues?
> - If yes, are there other issues to work on?
see below
>
> In your review please include ISSUE-614
I guess a reply to the original will do

Regards,
 -Paolo


specific comments:

----------
sec. 2
----------
++ "A given dictionary forms a given structure for its members. A different structure (obtained either by insertion or removal of
members) constitutes a different dictionary. "

this sentence is not very clear to me. I think this is trying to say what the rest of the paragraph says, namely that
"for the purpose of provenance, a dictionary entity is viewed as a snapshot of a structure . Insertion and removal operations result
in new snapshots, each snapshot forming an identifiable dictionary entity"

maybe rephrase this slightly?  suggestion:
"for the purpose of provenance, a dictionary entity is viewed as a snapshot of a dictionary data structure, following a sequence of
state-changing insertion and removal operations. These  operations result in new snapshots, each snapshot forming an identifiable
dictionary entity"

But this (that dictionaries, and in general collections, are snapshot of data structures with a state) is an important point which I
can see that is gone missing from PROV-DM: http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-dm/#component6
Thus, if it was not made there, maybe drop it from here, as well?

++
" i.e. an entity that can participate in relations amongst dictionaries;"
suggest:  i.e. an entity that can participate in relations that involve dictionaries and their member entities;

++
"The dictionary membership allows stating the members of a Dictionary, and has the purpose of providing more structure than the
collection membership relation."
suggest:
Similar to the collection membership relation, the dictionary membership allows stating the members of a Dictionary. However, it
provides additional structure."

++
 "Whereas the collection membership relation applies to entities having prov:type = 'prov:Collection' or prov:type =
'prov:Dictionary', the dictionary membership only applies to the latter."
how can the collection membership in PROV-DM have a reference to prov:type = 'prov:Dictionary'?

"Note that dictionary membership implies collection membership,"
this may be unclear because, formally, the former cannot be a sub-relation of the latter (they have different arguments).
Suggestion: make a reference to top of sec. 6.1 (inferences) where this implication is formalized

----------
sec 2.2
----------
++
 "each key_i is expected to be unique for the key-entity-set;"
  make a ref. to 6.1 inf 2?

ex. 3 and following:
  "d0 is the set..."  would it be more appropriate to write "d0 was the set..."?

----------
sec 3.1
----------
 
++
do we need an explicit (trivial) production for dIdentifier? i.e.
dIdentifier ::= identifier

----------
sec 4
----------
 Would it be useful to specify which of these specifications extend the PROV-O vocabulary for Collections?
i.e.
   prov:hadDictionaryMember replaces prov:hadMember
   prov:KeyValuePair  is a new relation
   etc

----------
sec 6
----------
should the rules be numbered for easy reference?
   
IF derivedByRemovalFrom(d2, d1, {"k1"}) THEN hadDictionaryMember(d1, e1, "k1")
I am in favour of removing this constraint.



-- 
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Paolo Missier - Paolo.Missier@newcastle.ac.uk, pmissier@acm.org 
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University,  UK
http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/Paolo.Missier
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