Re: PROV-ISSUE-206: three proposals to vote on (deadline Jan 15th midnight GMT)

My only concern here is that if you don't need to be an agent to be
involved with wasAssociatedWith and its sub-relations - then why would
you want to assert something is an agent at all? Would it then not
become out of scope for PROV?


On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 13:27, Luc Moreau <L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

>> However, I think this has undesirable consequences. For instance, in the example that follows constraint
>> http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/ProvenanceModel.html#wasStartedBy,
>> we see that an entity (a request to create an activity) is inferred to become
>> an agent because of the above inferences.

Well, it could also be the wasStartedBy(a1,a2) interference rule that
is wrong by introducing the phantom entity. :-)


>> Hence, proposal 1: remove inference association-agent from the document.

+1


>> Furthermore, for the example above to type correctly,
>>
>> proposal 2: allow wasAssociatedWith to relate an activity and an entity

+1

I assume this would also allow an example like:

entity(ex:perl, [prov:type="ex:Tool", ex:path="/usr/bin/perl"] )
entity(ex:server, [prov:type="ex:Machine", hostname="server.example.com"] )

activity(ex:analysis)
used(ex:analysis, ex:data)
wasAssociatedWith(ex:analysis, ex:perl)
wasAssociatedWith(ex:analysis, ex:server)


..without having to worry about if ex:perl or ex:server was an agent or not.


>> proposal 3: allow two forms for wasAssociatedWith:
>>            wasAssociatedWith(activity, agent, plan, attributes)
>>               and
>>            wasAssociatedWith(activity, entity, attributes)

+1

I read this as if there is a plan, it must be an agent (the entity is
actively associated with the activity), otherwise, for all we know
it's just an entity which the activity had something to do with (which
was not usage?).

What is the semantic difference between the two proposed forms, only
the agent inference? Can they both have roles?




Can you have an agent actively associated with an activity without
having a plan, but also have a different agent which just 'had
something to do with' the activity?

agent(John)
agent(Sarah)
agent(Fred)

specializationOf(sickFred, fred)
specializationOf(healthyFred, fred)
// side-note: are these also agents?

activity(surgery)
wasAssociatedWith(act1, Sarah, NOPLAN, [prov:role="surgeon"])
wasAssociatedWith(act1, John, [prov:role="observer"])
wasAssociatedWith(act1, operationTable)
used(surgery, sickFred, [prov:role="patient"])
wasGeneratedBy(healthyFred, surgery, [prov:role="patient"])

here John was not acting as an agent in the surgery activity, he was
just an observer that happened to be there. Sarah on the other hand -
although a rogue surgeon with no plan, was actively performing.


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

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2012 00:12:59 UTC