Re: A proposed provenance wg draft charter

Hi Deborah:

For the record, I'd like to respond to a few things you said that put  
in question the work that we have been doing in the group.

On Oct 15, 2010, at 5:34 AM, Deborah McGuinness wrote:
>
> There was some disappointment in the group when we chose to map the  
> other contender models to a single model, but most if not all  
> understood that decision from the perspective of time.

This is simply not true.  Quite the contrary, the suggestion to map  
all models to OPM was made in the face to face meeting by someone not  
involved in OPM, and supported enthusiastically by everyone.  Most  
people there said that they were already working on mappings to OPM.   
Later on during the process, people commented on how easy the mapping  
had been.  I think Satya, who organized the mapping effort, already  
made this point in his response to your message.

> I can not say though that i (or i expect others who were  
> disappointed) could go along with this position in a proposed charter.
>
> I am sorry that this comes from someone who did not participate  
> nearly as much as I had hoped to.
> I had an extremely bad year with my mother's multiple  
> hospitalizations and general overwhelming health problems and her  
> subsequent passing.   I simply have had no choice but to put  
> everything other than family health at a much lower priority.

I am sorry that you were not able to participate more given your  
personal circumstances, and we all understand that.  I would like to  
say that many others in the group went through a lot of personal and  
professional hardship, some pretty serious, but they still managed to  
contribute.  You chose to contribute to other things during this year,  
which is fine, but others in their own hard circumstances chose to  
channel some of their time to contribute to this group.

It is really unfortunate that other people involved in PML besides  
yourself also chose to make only a limited investment and therefore  
have marginal participation in the Provenance Incubator.  Since the  
first few months of the group's activities, we have been seeking use  
cases and requirements that illustrate the important points in the  
design of PML, but we have not been getting much in terms of concrete  
points of discussion.  We could not even get a PML researcher to  
participate in the vocabulary mappings effort, someone else had to  
figure this out so the group could move forward while being inclusive  
of your perspective.

> Fast working groups are good but I think we should focus on the  
> outcome rather than fast.  it is not that fast precludes quality but  
> we should not focus on fast and have that preclude other options  
> that may be considered more representative of the broader provenance  
> community.

This is not a fair thing to say.  Noone is disregarding the outcome.   
Simply put, after over a year of discussions I think there is a common  
ground and a momentum that we want to keep going and a perceived  
immediate need for us to produce.

> I see two routes that could be taken (and of course there are more).
> 1 - write a charter now that takes starting points as input

> 2 - follow the owl model and form an adhoc working group whose aim  
> it is to come up with a joint submission for the starting point.


The Provenance Incubator has been working for several months on  
looking at different perspectives on provenance in different  
communities (including yours), gathering use cases and requirements,  
and working on a recommendation.  I do not understand the suggestion  
to start a working group to discuss what we have already been  
discussing.  The current group has been mapping provenance  
vocabularies for some time now, and I believe Paul and Luc and others  
felt they had a starting point to put forward for discussion.

By asking for a new group, you are being dismissive of the work that  
we have been doing and continue to do in the Provenance Incubator.  We  
have indeed been actively seeking participation of different  
communities, discussing common grounds, and working towards  
formulating a starting point.

Whatever technical issues you have with the current charter proposal  
are definitely worth bringing up, and I think you may have valid  
points.  Please join the ongoing conversation and contribute  
constructively and in concrete terms.

Yolanda