--- a/model/working-copy/towards-wd4.html Tue Feb 07 09:23:06 2012 +0000
+++ b/model/working-copy/towards-wd4.html Tue Feb 07 09:39:42 2012 +0000
@@ -728,88 +728,23 @@
<h3>Activity-Agent Relation</h3>
<section id="record-ActivityAssociation">
-<h4>Activity Association Record</h4>
-
-<p>The key purpose of agents in PROV-DM is to assign responsibility
-for activities. It is important to reflect that there is a degree in
-the responsibility of agents, and that is a major reason for
-distinguishing among all the agents that have some association with an
-activity and determine which ones are really the originators of the
-entity. For example, a programmer and a researcher could both be
-associated with running a workflow, but it may not matter what
-programmer clicked the button to start the workflow while it would
-matter a lot what researcher told the programmer to do so. Another
-example: a student publishing a web page describing an academic
-department could result in both the student and the department being
-agents associated with the activity, and it may not matter what
-student published a web page but it matters a lot that the department
-told the student to put up the web page. So there is some notion of
-responsibility that needs to be captured. </p>
-
-<p>Examples of activity association include designing, participation, initiation and termination, timetabling or sponsoring. </p>
-
-
-<p>Provenance reflects activities that have occurred. In some
-cases, those activities reflect the execution of a plan that was
-designed in advance to guide the execution. PROV-DM allows attaching
-a plan to an activity record, which represents what was intended to
-happen. The plan can be useful for various tasks, for example to
-validate the execution as represented in the provenance record, to
-manage expectation failures, or to provide explanations.</p>
-
-
+<h4>Activity Association</h4>
-<p>In the context of PROV-DM, a <dfn>plan</dfn> should be understood as the description of a set of
-actions or steps intended by one or more agents to achieve some goal. PROV-DM is not
-prescriptive about the nature of plans, their representation, the
-actions and steps they consist of, and their intended goals. Hence,
-for the purpose of this specification, a plan can be a workflow for a
-scientific experiment, a recipe for a cooking activity, or a list of
-instructions for a micro-processor execution. While PROV-DM does not
-specify the representations of plans, it allows for activities to be
-associated with plans. Furthermore, since plans may evolve over time,
-it may become necessary to track their provenance, and hence, plans are
-entities. An activity MAY be associated with multiple plans. This
-allows for descriptions of activities initially associated with a
-plan, which was changed, on the fly, as the activity progresses. Plans
-can be successfully executed or they can fail. We expect applications
-to exploit PROV-DM <a href="#extensibility-section">extensibility
-mechanisms</a> to capture the rich nature of plans and associations
-between activities and plans.</p>
-
-
-<p>Thus, PROV-DM offers two kinds of records. The first, introduced in this section, represents an association between an agent, a plan, and an activity; the second, introduced in <a
-href="#record-responsibility">Section Responsibility record</a>, represents the fact that an agent was acting on behalf of another, in the context of an activity. </p>
+<p>As far as responsibility is concerned, PROV-DM offers two kinds of constructs. The first, introduced in this section, represents an association between an agent, a plan, and an activity; the second, introduced in <a
+href="#record-responsibility">Section Responsibility</a>, represents the fact that an agent was acting on behalf of another, in the context of an activity. </p>
-<p>An <dfn id="dfn-activity-association">activity association record</dfn>, written <span class="name">wasAssociatedWith(id,a,ag2,pl,attrs)</span> in PROV-ASN, has the following
+<p>An <dfn id="dfn-activity-association">activity association</dfn><span class="withAsn">, written <span class="name">wasAssociatedWith(id,a,ag2,pl,attrs)</span> in PROV-ASN,</span> has the following
constituents:</p>
<ul>
-<li><em>id</em>: an OPTIONAL identifier <span class="name">id</span> identifying the activity association record;</li>
-<li><em>activity</em>: an identifier <span class="name">a</span> for an activity record;</li>
-<li><em>agent</em>: an identifier <span class="name">ag2</span> for an agent record, which represents the agent associated with the activity;</li>
-<li><em>plan</em>: an OPTIONAL identifier <span class="name">pl</span> for an entity record, which represents a plan adopted by the agent in the context of this activity;
-<li><em>attributes</em>: an OPTIONAL set of attribute-value pairs <span class="name">attrs</span> that describe the modalities of association of this activity with this agent.</li>
+<li><em>id</em>: an OPTIONAL identifier for the association between an activity and an agent;</li>
+<li><em>activity</em>: an identifier for the activity;</li>
+<li><em>agent</em>: an identifier for the agent associated with the activity;</li>
+<li><em>plan</em>: an OPTIONAL identifier for an entity, which is the plan adopted by the agent in the context of this activity;
+<li><em>attributes</em>: an OPTIONAL set of attribute-value pairs that describe the modalities of association of this activity with this agent.</li>
</ul>
-<div class="withAsn">
-<p>In PROV-ASN, an activity association record's text matches the <span class="nonterminal">activityAssociationRecord</span> productions of the grammar defined in this specification
-document.</p>
-
-<div class='grammar'>
-<span class="nonterminal">activityAssociationRecord</span> ::=
-<span class="name">wasAssociatedWith</span>
-<span class="name">(</span>
-<span class="optional"><span class="nonterminal">identifier</span>,</span>
-<span class="nonterminal">aIdentifier</span>,
-<span class="nonterminal">agIdentifier</span>
-<span class="optional">,<span class="nonterminal">eIdentifier</span></span>
-<span class="nonterminal">optional-attribute-values</span>
-<span class="name">)</span>
-</div>
-</div>
-
<div class="anexample">
In the following example, a designer and an operator agents are asserted to be associated with an activity. The designer's goals are achieved by a workflow <span class="name">ex:wf</span>.
<pre class="codeexample">
@@ -1428,43 +1363,27 @@
<section id="record-annotation">
-<h4>Annotation Record</h4>
+<h4>Annotation</h4>
-<p>An <dfn id="dfn-annotation">annotation record</dfn> establishes a link between an identifiable PROV-DM record and a note record referred to by its identifier. Multiple note records can
-be associated with a given PROV-DM record; symmetrically, multiple PROV-DM records can be associated with a given note record. Since note records have identifiers, they can also be
-annotated. The annotation mechanism (with note record and the annotation record) forms a key aspect of the extensibility mechanism of PROV-DM (see <a
+<p>An <dfn id="dfn-annotation">annotation</dfn> establishes a link between something that is identifiable and a note referred to by its identifier. Multiple notes can
+be associated with a given identified object; symmetrically, multiple objects can be associated with a given note. Since notes have identifiers, they can also be
+annotated. The annotation mechanism (with note and annotation) forms a key aspect of the extensibility mechanism of PROV-DM (see <a
href="#extensibility-section">extensibility section</a>).</p>
-<p>An annotation record, written <span class="name">hasAnnotation(r,n,attrs)</span> in PROV-ASN, has the following constituents:</p>
+<p>An annotation<span class="withAsn">, written <span class="name">hasAnnotation(r,n,attrs)</span> in PROV-ASN,</span> has the following constituents:</p>
<ul>
-<li><em>record</em>: an identifier <span class="name">r</span> of the record being annnotated;</li>
-<li><em>note</em>: an identifier <span class="name">n</span> of a note record;</li>
-<li><em>attributes</em>: an OPTIONAL set <span class="name">attrs</span> of attribute-value pairs to further describe this record.</li>
+<li><em>something</em>: the identifier of someting being annnotated;</li>
+<li><em>note</em>: an identifier of a note;</li>
+<li><em>attributes</em>: an OPTIONAL set of attribute-value pairs to further describe this annotation.</li>
</ul>
-</div>
-<p>In PROV-ASN, a note record's text matches the <span class="nonterminal">noteRecord</span> production of the grammar defined in this specification document.
-</p>
-
-<div class='grammar'>
-<span class="nonterminal">annotationRecord</span> ::=
-<span class="name">hasAnnotation</span>
-<span class="name">(</span>
-<span class="nonterminal">identifier</span>
-<span class="name">,</span>
-<span class="nonterminal">nIdentifier</span>
-<span class="nonterminal">optional-attribute-values</span>
-<span class="name">)</span>
-</div>
-</div>
-
<p>The interpretation of notes is application-specific. See Section <a href="#record-note">Note</a> for a discussion of the difference between note attributes and other records attributes.
We also note the present tense in this term to indicate that it may not denote something in the past.</p>
<div class="anexample">
<p>
-The following records</p>
+The following expressions</p>
<pre class="codexample">
entity(e1,[prov:type="document"])
entity(e2,[prov:type="document"])
@@ -1479,10 +1398,10 @@
note(n2,[ex:style="dotted"])
hasAnnotation(u1,n2)
</pre>
-<p>assert the existence of two documents in the world (attribute-value pair: <span class="name">prov:type="document"</span>) identified by <span class="name">e1</span> and <span
-class="name">e2</span>, and annotate these records with a note indicating that the icon (an application specific way of rendering provenance) is <span class="name">doc.png</span>. It also
-asserts an activity, its usage of the first entity, and its generation of the second entity. The <span class="name">usage</span> record is annotated with a style (an application specific way
-of rendering this edge graphically). To be able to express this annotation, the usage record was provided with an identifier <span class="name">u1</span>, which was then referred to in <span
+<p>assert the existence of two documents (attribute-value pair: <span class="name">prov:type="document"</span>) identified by <span class="name">e1</span> and <span
+class="name">e2</span>, and annotate them with a note indicating that the icon (an application specific way of rendering provenance) is <span class="name">doc.png</span>. It also
+asserts an activity, its usage of the first entity, and its generation of the second entity. The <span class="name">usage</span> is annotated with a style (an application specific way
+of rendering this edge graphically). To be able to express this annotation, the usage was provided with an identifier <span class="name">u1</span>, which was then referred to in <span
class="name">hasAnnotation(u1,n2)</span>.
</p>
</div>