Re: PROV-ISSUE-4: Defining Agent using FOAF's definition

Stian,

Your comment raises a question of scope...

Until now, the general assumption has been that provenance is about things which 
have happened (hence the past tense/time debates), rather than what *should* 
have happened.  I think the key point is that there is no conditionallity about 
provenance.

What you raise, I think, is a use of provenance as part of establishing blame 
rather than trust.  I think this is a separate issue that (for the time being at 
least) we should not dig into.

#g
--

Stian Soiland-Reyes wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 06:28, Luc Moreau <L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Reiterating a previous comment I made, can an Agent be defined independently
>> of process execution?
> 
> There might be agents who DIDN'T initiate/control a process when
> perhaps they should have. I'm not sure how that could be captured in
> provenance - perhaps they were involved in the overall process.
> 
> In terms of example, imagine the journalist example
> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ProvenanceExample:
> 
> * analyst (alice) downloads a turtle serialization (lcp1) of the
> resource (r1) from government portal
> * analyst (alice) generates a chart (c1) from the turtle (lcp1) using
> some software (tools1) with statistical assumptions (stats1
> 
> Alice the Analyst agent does however *not* control or initiate a
> process for Verifying the conversion data (d1) to RDF (f1). She does
> not even look at the raw data d1 (perhaps it's not been published in
> raw format).
> 
> If that had been in the original provenance trail then Bob the Blogger
> might more easily conclude that the re-published data has been
> tampered with to deal with the news story, and that the government's
> argument about "something went wrong going to RDF" could be a
> cover-up.
> 
> 
> A question is if Ed the Editor should have spotted this - how was he
> involved in reviewing the story and Alice's acting as an agent before
> it was published? He is the missing agent. (This sounds like a poor
> movie plot line)
>

Received on Friday, 24 June 2011 10:53:14 UTC