Re: A proposed provenance wg draft charter

On Monday 25 October 2010 13:32:10 Paolo Missier wrote:
> Hi,
>   a couple of further comments on this thread:
> 
> On 25/10/2010 07:41, Olaf Hartig wrote:
> > Hey,
> > 
> > On Sunday 24 October 2010 15:50:28 Paul Groth wrote:
> >> Hi Olaf,
> >> 
> >> Thanks for the comments. Really good. Some replies in-line
> >> [...]
> >> * You speak about "provenance of any web-resource". I still struggle to
> >> see
> > 
> > how Web resources, in general, have provenance. To me provenance is
> > associated primarily with specific representations of Web resources that
> > we retrieve from the Web.
> 
> why wouldn't resources have provenance?

The problem is that a Web resource may change; it may have a different state at 
a different point in time. What would the provenance of such a changing thing 
be?
A specific representation of a Web resource cannot change. That's why I find it 
much easier to talk about the provenance of such representations rather than  
the Web resource itself.
That's probably also why artifacts in OPM are immutable pieces of state.

> just like a piece of data in a database.

In the case of a database I would also prefer to associate provenance with 
manifestations of the data. For instance, given a table, I would not associate 
provenance with the table per se but with a specific version / state of the 
table. Same with a cell in such a table: I would associate provenance with a 
specific attribute value thats in the cell rather than with the cell itself.

> I see it the opposite way: isn't the provenance of a
> manifestation of a resource is just (some view of) the provenance of the
> resource itself?

I wouldn't say so. What you say would mean that multiple different 
manifestations of the same (state of the same) Web resource have the same 
provenance (even if different views on it). Shouldn't they have different 
provenance (even if several pieces of their provenance are overlapping)?
Let's say, both of us retrieve a representation of a Web resource; we do it at 
the same point in time; so, if we are lucky, we have two representations that 
represent the Web resource in the same state. Nonetheless, I think these two 
representations have different provenance.

Greetings,
Olaf

Received on Monday, 25 October 2010 13:54:41 UTC