Zhao2004using presented by Tim Lebo 9 oct 2008

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Presentation given at CSCI 6966 Advanced Semantic Web (Fall 2008) - Lesson 7

• Speaker: Tim Lebo
• Title: Using Semantic Web Technologies for Representing E-science Provenance
• Authors: Jun Zhao, Chris Wroe, Carole Goble, Robert Stevens, Dennis Quan, Mark Greenwood
• Conference: ISWC 2004
• URL: http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/Image:Zhao2004using.pdf
• Date of Presentation: 2008/10/09

Questions

ID	Question	Name	Answer
Tim Lebo Escience Provenance Gregory Todd Williams 1	The use of Haystack as a means of showing provenance data to scientists seems like a potentially poor choice. In particular, the interface shown in Figure 5 seems overly complex, making it difficult to easily understand relationships between concepts. A feature of Haystack is mentioned allowing complex graphs to be rendered as "user interface screens that behave like the much more familiar frames of web pages." This alternate UI is not shown, however. Do you think a compelling interface for this type of provenance data could be developed based solely on the schema ontology, or might custom interfaces that rely on the domain specific ontologies be required on a per-project basis?	Gregory Todd Williams
Zhao2004using presented by Tim Lebo 9 oct 2008 Jesse Weaver	How would you say this approach compares with or fits in with the Open Provenance Model (that James Michaelis presented last week)?	Jesse Weaver
Zhao2004using presented by Tim Lebo 9 oct 2008 Joshua Shinavier 1	I'm also curious about the choice of LSIDs as identifiers. Is there anything about the LSID system which could not be achieved more simply (i.e. without an additional standard, additional tools including SOAP services and clients) using HTTP? The AuthorityID might as well be the domain name portion of an HTTP URI. The authority server then optionally redirects to the resolution service. The authors mention only querying and data retrieval, but perhaps a resolution service also provides metadata management services which require the RPC functionality of SOAP (and/or other protocols)? In that case, is a single client expected to be able to communicate with a variety of resolution services, using diverse protocols?	Joshua Shinavier
Zhao2004using presented by Tim Lebo 9 oct 2008 Joshua Taylor 1	The authors give some reasons for using LSIDs as opposed to URLs, but I'm not sure that I understand their reasoning. The "perceived benefits" include: "1a) … [The] workflow system needs to pass raw data between services without any metadata annotations; 1b) Data and metadata can reside in different locations; 1c) Metadata may be attached to resources for which we have no control." These are all achievable using HTTP and traditional URLs. "2) An explicit social convention committment to maintaining immutable and permanent data." [emphasis added] If the convention is only social and not technical, why not create something like PURL for life science data, with the agreement that the resources at the other end of the permanent URLs will not change? Of course, they do make the point that there is significant LSID support (e.g., from IBM), so there must be something to it. What's so useful about LSIDs?	Joshua A. Taylor