W3C Provenance Working Group Charter - another alternate version for discussion

Dear All,

Deborah and I had a discussion on Monday.  This discussion was in follow 
up to the meeting that Jim, Deborah, and I had at RPI two weeks ago and 
that was reported by Jim through an email to the group. I did an editing 
pass in the original draft of the charter on Monday and Deborah took an 
edit pass on top of that late Monday. The updated version of the draft 
attached here is in review mode so that you can see the rationale behind 
our changes (and hopefully comment them further).

We were hoping that Jim would be able to do an edit pass but his has 
been very busy at Supercomputing 2010 and probably with challenging 
connectivity. This means that the comments in this updated draft may not 
necessarily reflect Jim’s opinions.

We understand that the document is going to spur some discussion but we 
would like to highlight some of the principles used during our 
conversation and that Deborah and I considered in our comments:

We understand the following:
1)	The provenance community needs to make progress soon if the community 
wants the outcomes of the proposed working group to have impact;
2)	Provenance has many dimensions and that the group has a good 
understanding of some dimensions while our collective understanding of 
other dimensions is still very superficial – thus the working group will 
need to focus its efforts in the well-known parts of provenance – the 
so-called core concepts of provenance;
3)	No single provenance language can claim to have representation 
mechanisms for all already-identified core provenance concepts and just 
core provenance concepts (i.e., no language is a minimal representation 
of core provenance concepts). However, we also understand that the 
provenance languages discussed in the Provenance Incubator Group have 
ways of representing most of these core concepts and that the proposed 
working group needs to leverage all such languages in order to make 
progress fast.

Many thanks,
Paulo (Deborah and Jim)