Re: PROV-ISSUE-1 (define-resource): Definition for concept 'Resource' [Provenance Terminology]

Jim

isn't the legal/physical distinction from your example an instance of diferent "accounts" (in OPM terms), i.e., different observers 
collecting different sequences of events, which may partially overlap. This is just to clarify, it seems to be we do have concepts 
to deal with this distinction.

Regards, -Paolo


  On 6/2/11 3:15 PM, Myers, Jim wrote:
> This issue is not just aggregation. I have an iPass and the state considers any vehicle with that iPass in it to be mine and expects me to pay tolls when it engages in drive-on-tollway events. There are times when that legal vehicle is my physical car and times when its a rental. (I.e. I would not say my car had all its parts replaced when I use a rental car).
>
> I think we have exactly this issue in our scenarios - the legal/logical data from the goverment corresponds to different physical file objects at different times and we want to track provenance across the legal/logical and physical processes that occur. We are asking in queries whether the logical result depends on the government data even when all of the physical bits of the input used are completely different (on a different disk, perhaps in a different format) than the government data file. If we don't track the logical government data separately from physical files that at times are manifestations of it, we get paradoxes from our limited model that don't exist in the real world. (File copying preserves the logical-to-physical correspondence, editing a file to be all zeros does not, so if you have a derived result from any copy created before an edit occurred, you're result is logically dependent on the government data...).
>
> We really have these types of logical to physical relationships throughout science as well - we assume the reading from the sensor is the logical temperature but would question that relationship if we had provenance of a 'smashed' event for the sensor. The logical temperature may at times have separate provenance from the sensor reading and we may want to track both.
>
> In a practical sense, I think modeling this way involves very little change to OPM-style provenance. In addition to artifact-process execution-artifact type chains, you have the occasional links that connect resources - physical file is a manifestation of the gov data - that allow you to cross from thinking about legal/logical/intellectual provenance to physical/computational provenance, etc. That 'minor' addition would avoid further discussion of how/when to categorize specific things as mutable/immutable, etc. and probably remove the need for special case opm:agent and pml:source style types as well.
>
>   Jim

Received on Monday, 6 June 2011 14:26:14 UTC