Provenance team reply on the Agent roles

[Laurent MICHEL]

Dear semantics,

Provenance has reached the TCG vote step. However, Markus expressed some 
reservations about the vocabulary of the Agent roles.
Although this is not a showstopper, we believe we have to give an answer 
on the list:

The agent role is specified as free text that should use the given 
vocabulary. This feature is important to describe and compare Provenance 
instances within one project but it is not always sufficient to match 
instances from different sources. This would require a field with a 
controlled vocabulary.

It is to be noted that there is no global VO reference dictionary from 
which we could get standard definitions for the 4 items we borrowed from 
others VO standards (Publisher, Provider, Creator and Contributor). This 
could get better once the future Vocabularies2.0 will be a REC.

The list of Agent roles has been gathered at the beginning of the 
project from all use cases considered at this time and considering that 
the roles are not defined as a vocabulary, we really wish to keep it as 
it is.

However we agree that the Table9 caption is meaningless. We propose to 
replace it with a mention saying the 4 words marked with a (*) are also 
used by others VO standards.

DM chair on the behalf of the authors

-- 
---- Laurent MICHEL              Tel  (33 0) 3 68 85 24 37
      Observatoire de Strasbourg  Fax  (33 0) 3 68 85 24 32
      11 Rue de l'Universite      Mail laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
      67000 Strasbourg (France)   Web  http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~michel
---