Re: ACTION-91: comment regarding completeness

Tim

<snip>
On 6/8/12 4:26 PM, Timothy Lebo wrote:
>
> On Jun 8, 2012, at 11:19 AM, Paolo Missier wrote:
>
>>
>>>>
>>>> "The attributecomplete <http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/prov-dm.html#membership.complete>is optional. It is 
>>>> interpreted as follows:
>>>> - if it is present and set to true, then c is known to include all and only the members specified in the key-entity-set.
>>>
>>>
>>> ^^^ This kind of "future proofing" is what raised the "completeness concerns", so I suggest toning this down.
>>> As I've said before, avoiding the OWA's "anything can come down the road" and instead focusing on "this is believed to be true, 
>>> according to the asserter" eases the completeness objections.
>>
>> no problems with that, but as I pointed out in past discussions on this, this is true in general for /all/ provenance assertions, 
>> not just collections... right?
>
> I guess so.
> Which is why we don't have a "complete" flag on Entity, right?
rather, on relations:

wasDerivedFrom(e,a,...)

is believed to be true by the asserter /and at the time of the assertion/.
We never really discussed what happens if tomorrow I find out that was not the case -- we barely managed to agree that your 
observations and mine need not be consistent, and we agreed that consistency is out of scope.

so that's where I think the OWA discussion should be situated.

regarding the specific "complete" flag issue,  I thought we had already concluded that, for the specific case of collection 
membership, the "complete" flag is nothing but syntactic sugar for insertion into an empty collection (or dictionary).

>
> So what you're doing is saying "if you ever try to talk about _my_ dictionary, you're talking about a different dictionary!"?
not sure I follow this?  if this is saying that provenance is relative to the observer and others have different views over "what 
happened" then yes, but again I think we have agreed (wisely, I should say)  not to go there.

--Paolo