Objective 4.2 : Change "provenance" to "data management"

The text in v1.123 is:
"""
4.2 Provenance
It should be possible for query results to include source or provenance
information.
"""

At the face-to-face, I suggested that one practical, restricted way we might
view this was as data management.  It is not a complete solution to
provenance but that requires a common approach in more than just this
working group anyway.

Many RDF systems go beyond pure RDF and expose additional information about
where statements came from.  This has been found to be useful in writing
applications.

Suggested rewording to cover exposing just the data management information
that an RDF repository might have:

"""
4.2. Support for RDF Aggregation Graphs

RDF can be used for data integration and aggregation where an RDF repository
is built by merging RDF triples from several other RDF repositories or from
non-RDF source converted to RDF.  Such an aggregation can be real or
virtual.  

In such an RDF graph, the query client may wish to know where the target
server originally collected a triple or subgraph from.  The query language
and protocol should enable an RDF repository to expose such information.
"""

This is a design objective, not a requirement.

It is supposed to be neutral as to whether we are talking about quads or
something based around log:includes style.

The merging of RDF graphs together is often called data aggregation (c.f.
RSS aggregators) so I used the term "aggregation graphs" to differentiate it
from aggregate query.  This is not union query - the aggregate graph exists,
and is not just for the purposes of a single query - but exposing the nature
of a union (if adopted) might be a consequence.

Would people whose system expose this sort of information say what their
experiences have been?

	Andy

Received on Monday, 19 July 2004 15:06:45 UTC