Necessity of ActivityDescription [was: IVOA Provenance DM -RFC- answers to comments]

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi Mireille,

Here's another topic from the RFC responses (keeping topics apart to
try and have focussed discussions):

On Sun, Nov 04, 2018 at 08:26:09PM +0100, Mireille LOUYS wrote:
> > > http://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ProvenanceRFC
> > I've posted the following to the Wiki, but I thought having it on the
> > list might be more conducive to discussions, so here's what I my
> > thoughts were while reviewing this.
> > 
> > TL;DR: let's only have the core model in 1.0.  We can always add
> > extensions in 1.1.
> we need the ActivityDescription class and Parameter class to be able to
> search for some specific processing type on the data.
> Activity is only the process launched for the computation.
> It does not hold the details of the methods , because those details are
> factorised in the ActivityDescription class.

You mean "Find me all source extractions being done on the images of
this data collection"?  That *does* sound like a fairly basic thing to
want to do, yes, and from what I see in the current Activity model, it
would, indeed, seem to be impossible just with what's there.

I'm sure the W3C has a plan for this -- do you know what it is?  Can't
we just follow them or is there a use case we have they don't?

   -- Markus