ISSUE-391: Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component

jzhao

Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component

State:
CLOSED
Product:
prov-dm
Raised by:
Jun Zhao
Opened on:
2012-06-03
Description:
The PROV-O team are in the process of reflecting the modeling of Membership in the ontology. By reading deeply into the section 5.6.5 of the DM spec about Membership, I wonder whether we should reflect a bit on the DM modeling on this construct.

It would have been straightforward to use this construct to declare which key-value pair as being a member of a collection. However, the definition of Membership shows that this construct is designed for expressing much more than this:

- The DM doc says that: "The membership relation removes the need for explicit mention of the state of the dictionary prior to each operation, allowing the state of a dictionary to be expressed without having to introduce a prior state." What does this "state of the dictionary" refer to? If we know the collection c1 before the insertion or deletion, and collection c2 after these activities, then we are all OK, right? I wonder whether this statement implies some scenarios that I am not aware of.

- A membership relation, written memberOf(id; c, {(key_1, e_1), ..., (key_n, e_n)}, cplt, attrs), has:
• id: an optional identifier identifying the relation;
• collection: an identifier (c) for the dictionary whose members are asserted;
• key-entity-set: a set of key-entity pairs (key_1, e_1), ..., (key_n, e_n) that are members of the dictionary;
• complete: an optional boolean Value (cplt); if true, it indicates that no other member belongs to the dictionary; if false, it indicates that other members belong to the dictionary; if unspecified, other members may belong to the dictionary.
• attributes: an optional set (attrs) of attribute-value pairs representing additional information about this relation.

It seems a rather complicated definition. Why do we have to mark a collection as "complete"? What additional attributes are we expecting to provide for a membership relation? This has direct impact on the prov ontology. The distinction between a membership and a collection is not that obvious. Can we live without a Membership class to express provenance of collections?

We would really like to have this issue resolved as soon as possible, in line with our internal release timeline, which is the upcoming Thursday. Help is much appreciated!

[1] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/prov-dm.html#component6

Cheers,

Jun
Related Actions Items:
No related actions
Related emails:
  1. Re: PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-09-04)
  2. Re: PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from jun.zhao@zoo.ox.ac.uk on 2012-06-18)
  3. Re: PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-14)
  4. Re: PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-14)
  5. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-07)
  6. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-07)
  7. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  8. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from Paolo.Missier@ncl.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  9. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-06)
  10. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  11. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from zednis@rpi.edu on 2012-06-06)
  12. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-06)
  13. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  14. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-06)
  15. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  16. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-06)
  17. Re: PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  18. Re: PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  19. Re: Changes to prov:Dictionary (from L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk on 2012-06-06)
  20. Changes to prov:Dictionary (from lebot@rpi.edu on 2012-06-05)
  21. PROV-ISSUE-391 (jzhao): Reflecting Membership in the Collection Component [prov-dm] (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2012-06-03)

Related notes:

No additional notes.

Display change log ATOM feed


Chair, Staff Contact
Tracker: documentation, (configuration for this group), originally developed by Dean Jackson, is developed and maintained by the Systems Team <w3t-sys@w3.org>.
$Id: 391.html,v 1.1 2013-06-20 07:37:41 vivien Exp $