Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm]

Hi Graham,

Nesting of accounts is no longer part of prov-dm, so name scoping has gone.
Given this, I propose to close this issue, unless you suggest otherwise.

FYI, identifiers, like attributes are defined to be qualified names in 
prov-dm [1],
with a requirement they map to  an IRI.    The syntactic details of 
qualified
names are left to the prov-n document.

Luc


[1] 
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/prov-dm.html#term-identifier


On 01/30/2012 11:01 AM, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:
> PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm]
>
> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/230
>
> Raised by: Graham Klyne
> On product: prov-dm
>
> The PROV-DM draft introduces name scoping, particularly with respect to Accounts.
>
> I think this is the wrong concept, as it tries to use name-scoping to capture different provenance accounts about the same entity.  I think that an entity id should refer to the same Entity wherever it occurs.  What may vary between accounts is the claims that are made about that entity.  Without this, I see no basis for comparing accounts.
>
> For PROV-DM, I imagine one one might say that the account+local id together form the common identifier (ala compound key), but then I think some additional mechanism would then be needed to link names from different accounts.
>
> When the names used are URIs, then I think that the notion of scoping is entirely wrong.  URIs are, by design, a *global* namespace, and it creates confusion (or worse) of one allows a URI to denote different things.  Personally, I would not prescribe the form of names used by the DM; the use of URIs is a syntactic matter, and as such it could be introduced for ASN.
>
> I see the DM as an "abstract syntax" in the sense proposed by John McCarthy, where the terms and productions have the form of logical predicates, and in particular a "name" is distinguished simply as a predicate "Name(id)" which is True iff "id" is a name.  This avoids any need to prescribe the actual form of referenced by the DM.
>
>
>
>    

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm

Received on Friday, 23 March 2012 15:13:28 UTC