At 10:13 AM +1000 9/22/06, Brian, Geoff wrote:
Hi all,
We have been having some discussion here about the use of the
Provenance definition for detailing the source of data used to build
data sets.
Currently Provenance provides information on the author, function
creation data, and links to reference and modification definitions.
We have been pondering what is the best technique for detailing where
in a reference data may be sourced from (the page/paragraph/figure or
table of reference documents). One consideration was to include this
information as a standard XML comment; however, the information would
then only be available to someone visually reading the dataset file.
Another consideration was to at add content attribute tags to
Provenance to allow <page number>, <paragraph number>, <figure
number> and < table number>, etc to be defined explicitly, although
this adds many attribute tags over complicates the provenance
definition. The other option discussed was to included a description
attribute to store the additional information.
The Provenance definition is only associated with tabular data and
function tables. We were also thinking that it would be useful to
associated provenance (optionally) with variableDefs and check data.
We commonly use VariableDefs to store constants (wing area, span
etc) as well as being used for MathML expressions. We can store the
information on the data source in the description attribute, but
would prefer to use a technique like the provenance definition as it
would provide a consistent way of defining source information for all
data/equations included in a dataset.
I am keen to here others ideas?
Regards
Geoff Brian
Geoff,
I'm at a loss as to how to best proceed. We could make provenance or
provenanceRef a sub-element of varDef; this would let you write the
provenance in the file header and then cite it wherever necesssary.
Regarding the need to cite page, number and verse, we should perhaps
flesh out the reference element to include more complete citation
information. Since a provenance points to a reference, would this
suffice?
-- Bruce
