Re: PROV-ISSUE-229 (Refactor-and-sub-edit): Document would benefit from refactoring and editing [prov-dm]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 09:15, Luc Moreau <L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

>>   Entity(id)
>>   Activity(id, start?, end?)
>>   Agent(id)
>>   Plan(id)
>>   Event(Id, time?)
>>   Account(id)
>>   Attributes(id, [attr1=val1, attr2=val2, ...])
> I don't understand what you save with this syntactic rewriting. Can you
> clarify?

I believe Graham means that this simplifies most of the subsections
that now each have to spend an additional paragraph about attributes.


> This seems to imply that Attributes, can be explain by themselves, that they
> are standalone.  Not sure this still corresponds to this idea of
> characterized thing we had for entity.

We already allow multiple 'attributes' statements in separate entity records:

entity(e0)
entity(e0, [ex:thing="fred", ex:soup="tomato"])
entity(e0, [ex:blah="1337"])

which is interpreted the same as a single merged record:

entity(e0, [ex:thing="fred", ex:soup="tomato", ex:blah="1337"]


.. and this fits well with the open world assumption in RDF.


I don't see any difference here if we allow attributes independently
of the entity/activity/* record:

attributes(e0, [ex:blah="1337"])

.. we just don't know what e0 is here. If we follow Graham's logic,
then e0 is always an entity, but might also be an activity, agent or
plan.


However from that logic you could just keep the current entity()
record and remove attributes from the other records - no need for the
new attributes() record. Using attributes() instead of entity() would
de-emphasize the 'is an entity' statement for types like activity and
agent.


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester

Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 11:33:40 UTC