Provenance (was RE: REX evaluation)

> > This is because "provenance" isn't well-defined for me. 
> 
> Yes; as I said, it's very overloaded. But, contra what you say below,
> there are lots of core use cases where *who* made assertion A is as
> important as the content of assertion A. When they made it and in what
> context -- say, in which web resource identified by a URI -- are
> equally crucial. Many of our use cases involving the Intelligence
> Community are *very* provenance-centric apps.
> 
> I don't know how or whether to really build support for this use case
> into the design of the query language and/or protocol; I do know,
> however, that this is a *common* use case (consider, for example,
> writing an RDF spider where the original source of the assertion is
> vital...)
> 
> > I see an RDF
> > repository as an RDF repository; I thought the whole point 
> of RDF was
> > that it made absolutely no difference who said something or 
> where that
> > information was stored so long as somebody said it somewhere,
> 
> Hmm, no, with all due respect, Rob, I think that's wrong. :>

I think we're using "RDF" to refer to different things here.
I recognize that provenance can be very useful in many RDF applications,
but I don't see provenence within the RDF spec. If it is actually
realized as triples (and there are ways to do that with provenance
information), then it's RDF, but if it's meta-information sitting
outside the RDF data model then I think it's somewhat out of scope.

I'm glad we've finally gotten down the list to talk about some of these
objectives that have never really been addressed.

Received on Wednesday, 9 June 2004 21:42:12 UTC