ISSUE-230: Name scoping in DM is wrong concept

Name-scoping

Name scoping in DM is wrong concept

State:

CLOSED

Product:

prov-dm

Raised by:

Graham Klyne

Opened on:

2012-01-30

Description:

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.

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Related emails:

1. Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-03-26)
2. Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from GK@ninebynine.org on 2012-03-25)
3. Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-03-23)
4. Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from GK@ninebynine.org on 2012-01-31)
5. RE: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from MYERSJ4@rpi.edu on 2012-01-31)
6. Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk on 2012-01-31)
7. Re: PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-01-31)
8. PROV-ISSUE-230 (Name-scoping): Name scoping in DM is wrong concept [prov-dm] (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2012-01-30)

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