Provenance team reply on the Agent roles

[Laurent MICHEL]

Markus,

I wrote my last message on the behalf on the author team, but I'm not 
mandated to continue the discussion with that hat.

Therefore, this answer denotes a personal point of view.


Le 16/12/2019 à 10:15, Markus Demleitner a écrit :
> Dear Laurent,
> 
> On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 06:34:23PM +0100, Laurent MICHEL wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Enabling interoperable use (which is "from different sources") is not
> the only reason for wishing a clear and well-defined vocabulary --
> with the current proposed set of terms, annotators will also have a
> hard time picking terms, as the meanings severely overlap, and the
> definitions are insufficient to disambiguate them.
> 
> This will become painful as soon as some software client actually
> wants to do interoperably interpret provenance information.  If you
> feel that's a flaw you want to live with, that's fine.  I'd still
> prefer it if things that you're not willing to define interoperably
> weren't part of the standard in the first place -- it's always easier
> to add something to a standard than to take something away.
> 
> Be that as it may: I'd hope interoperable interpretation of
> provenance can live without agent-role, and so, again, semantics
> won't block provenance.
To me this a design choice. Once you have said the a role *SHOULD* use a 
given vocabulary, you have broken the interoperability because whatever 
the proposed vocabulary is, the annotator could use its own words for 
this role and especially if he/she is not happy what is proposed by the 
standard. Then, the role of the agent must rather be understood as a 
descriptive thing.
Taking this into account and in my opinion it is more important to 
suggest words making sense for our annotator than focusing on the use a 
limited but orthogonal vocabulary.


> 
> But, very importantly:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> No, it won't.  The Vocabularies in the VO standard defines a
> *framework* in which to develop vocabularies in a way that, I hope,
> will make that a process as painless as possible.  It will *not*
> define any vocabularies.  On the contrary: it is the express goal of
> the endeavour that we no longer define terms just because we think
> we might need them one day -- that usually ends in deprecation and
> confusion --, but to define terms as a concrete need shows ("only
> scratch where there's an itch").
> 
I totally agree with, and may be I wasn't clear enough. My expectation 
is not that Vocabularies provides any sort of glossary. It is that 
Vocabulary given a good momentum to unify the VO Vocabularies.

> That means that without groups willing to spend the extra effort to
> make their word lists orthogonal and well-defined, exactly nothing
> will improve.
> 
> Having said that, as I take off my semantics hat and turn into a
> Registry activist: What exactly would you have expected as "standard
> definitions" of Publisher or Creator?  VOResource (where these come
> from) says in its schema:
> 
> Creator:
>    The entity (e.g. person or organisation) primarily responsible for
>    creating something
> 
> Publisher:
>    Entity (e.g. person or organisation) responsible for making the
>    resource available
> 
> They're certainly not optimal, yes, but in particular the definition
> of publisher is, I feel, a good start.
> 
> "Provider", on the other hand, isn't a term I'm familiar with in a VO
> context -- where have you seen it?  I'd pretty much say that should
> be "Publisher", no?
> 
> Finally, Contributor... Well, that's a painful thing even in
> VOResource, and I seem to remember having asked around on the mailing
> list for what we should do with it in the preparation for VOResource
> 1.1 (without any success if memory serves).
These definitions have been reused by Provenance.
The problem is that using words defined in VOResource creates a 
dependency between both standards although their scopes are very different.
I'd prefer to have a place where it is stated what a "publisher" is and 
that all standards using the concept of "publisher" refer to that place.

> 
> DataCite has a definition for it contributor might work, but that
> then has large overlaps with our existing creator and publisher
> terms.  Hence, I believe we first need to understand what we'd like
> contributor to do ("use cases") and then figure out how to bring that
> in line with DataCite or other external reference points.
> 
> So, yes, the situation might justifiably be called something of a
> mess.  But that will only improve if people start identifying sane
> subsets (which IMHO creator, publisher, and contact are: we
> understand what they denote and how they are to be used) and then
> successively grow these islands of clarity.
> 
> Agent-role would have been a chance to make that happen.  And,
> donning my semantics hat again, *I* would still like to use that
> chance.
I apologize to have not contributed to not take this chance.
I'll make it up to you next time with my source DM (hopefully) which 
keeps a large place for the vocabularies.

Laurent
> 
>          -- Markus
> 

-- 
---- Laurent MICHEL              Tel  (33 0) 3 68 85 24 37
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