prov-template: "Non Prov" statements

[d0rg0ld]

Hello!

In the book "Provenance: An Introduction to PROV", there is a recipe 4.1.9 "Modeling Sub-Activities" where it is suggested that the DC-terms vocabulary should be used to represent "part of" relationships between activities.

I tried to include that in a PROV template, but such "non prov statements" obviously get ignored during expansion.

My question would therefore be if there is any workaround in this regard, or I simply have to live with being limited to the PROV vocabulary when using PROV-template?

Thanks and best regards,
Doron

[d0rg0ld]

I did some more experiments regarding arbitrary namespaces in attribute-value pairs and found out the following:

while it seems possible to include attributes such as dc:partOf in the template, they only appear in the expanded doc when the associated value is not a variable:

the simple template

document
prefix var http://openprovenance.org/var#
prefix ex http://example.com#
prefix tmpl http://openprovenance.org/tmpl#
prefix dc http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
bundle ex:b
entity(var:upperEntity)
entity(var:lowerEntity, [dc:partOf='var:upperEntity'])
endBundle
endDocument

with bindings

prefix prov: http://www.w3.org/ns/prov# .
@Prefix tmpl: http://openprovenance.org/tmpl# .
@Prefix var: http://openprovenance.org/var# .
@Prefix ex: http://example.com# .
@Prefix dc: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ .
var:upperEntity a prov:Entity ;
tmpl:value_0 ex:someUpperEntityInstance .
var:lowerEntity a prov:Entity ;
tmpl:value_0 ex:someLowerEntityInstance .

expands to

document
bundle ex:b
prefix ex http://example.com#
entity(ex:someUpperEntityInstance)
entity(ex:someLowerEntityInstance)
endBundle
endDocument

ignoring the part of relationship, while explicitly setting the "target" of dc:partOf

document
prefix var http://openprovenance.org/var#
prefix ex http://example.com#
prefix tmpl http://openprovenance.org/tmpl#
prefix dc http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
bundle ex:b
entity(var:upperEntity)
entity(var:lowerEntity, [dc:partOf='ex:someUpperEntityInstance'])
endBundle
endDocument

is being copied to the expanded doc

document
bundle ex:b
prefix dc http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
prefix ex http://example.com#
entity(ex:someUpperEntityInstance)
entity(ex:someLowerEntityInstance,[dc:partOf = 'ex:someUpperEntityInstance'])
endBundle
endDocument

Moreover, as described in the PROV Template Specification at https://provenance.ecs.soton.ac.uk/prov-template-2014-06-07/ it is stated that statement level variables can occur also at attribute position, enabling to declare things like

document
prefix var http://openprovenance.org/var#
prefix ex http://example.com#
prefix tmpl http://openprovenance.org/tmpl#
prefix dc http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
bundle ex:b
entity(var:upperEntity)
entity(var:lowerEntity, [var:attr1='ex:someUpperEntityInstance'])
endBundle
endDocument

and expanding accordingly. The example above, however, gets ignored too during expansion:

document
bundle ex:b
prefix var http://openprovenance.org/var#
prefix ex http://example.com#
entity(ex:someUpperEntityInstance)
entity(ex:someLowerEntityInstance,[var:attr1 = 'ex:someUpperEntityInstance'])
endBundle
endDocument

I think that enabling template declarations such as

entity(var:lowerEntity, [var:attr1='var:value1'])

would be quite helpful