Provenance for section 3 in technologies.tex

Some proposed text to describe metadata provenance in section 3 - any
comments?

Metadata provenance: One of the key differences between the Semantic Web and
pre-existing systems is that the Semantic Web relies on using metadata from
many disparate sources, rather than having a centrally managed store of
metadata information. This means it is important to consider the provenance
of the metadata i.e. where it came from and who authored it. This
information is important because it enables the system processing the
metadata to make decisions about how to use it, for example if it possesses
several varying versions of metadata about the same object. In order to
guarantee provenance it may be necessary to use additional technologies e.g.
cryptographically ensure that the originator information is correct and that
the metadata has not been tampered with. Once the metadata has been ingested
by the system, the system can also make choices about how to represent the
provenance information e.g. by reifying individual statements or whether
adopting representations like quads that record the origin of individual
statements. Note that the usage of the term provenance is quite different to
its usage in the library community where it is used to refer to the record
of ownership of the item described by the metadata.

Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2003 11:55:07 UTC