Investigations should be specializations of Event

[ajnelson-nist]

Background

UCO Issue 541 introduced general uco-core:Events.

CASE's Investigation class has, to date, been encoded as a uco-core:ContextualCompilation. (This class design predates my own involvement in CASE, so I can only guess to motives for this.)

ContextualCompilation provides a "Set" construct that lets arbitrary items be grouped together, using uco-core:object.

Requirements

Requirement 1

Investigation should exercise Event.

Requirement 2

Investigations must maintain the ability to link InvestigativeActions, ProvenanceRecords, and other CASE classes that tie to investigative contexts.

This proposal does not impose a requirement they need to be linked with the same predicate as today, but other developments in UCO might mean they would no longer be linked the same way.

Risk / Benefit analysis

Benefits

• This appears, to the proposer, to align investigations with a more concrete experience than an abstract "Compilation of objections that share a context." As currently modeled, Investigation is more a representation of the set of things pertaining to an investigation, rather than the investigation itself.

Risks

• An in-flight proposal on the UCO tracker affects how Events could be required to behave differently from ContextualCompilations, so this might not be a backwards-compatible proposal. UCO Issue 544 introduces a disjoint pair of classes, endurants and perdurants. Under that proposal, Event would fall under Perdurant. While not written in the current proposal's state, it is likely that Compilation would be interpreted as an Endurant. If all that is accepted, an Investigation would not be able to be a ContextualCompilation and Event, as the classes would be disjoint.
• The endurant/perdurant proposal also introduces a relating predicate, participatesIn, domain endurant, range perdurant; and perdurantProperPartOf, domain perdurant, range perdurant. This would possibly change how InvestigativeActions relate to Investigations, as they may need to use perdurantProperPartOf (or some subproperty), while anything else (e.g. ProvenanceRecords) would need to use participatesIn.
• uco-core:object is a vaguely-described linking predicate with no RDFS domain specified and a nearly-maximally general UcoObject range, so it is not clear if existing data would need to be changed.

Competencies demonstrated

(Competencies deferred for discussion.)

Competency 1

Competency Question 1.1

Result 1.1

Competency Question 1.2

Result 1.2

Solution suggestion

For CASE 1.x.0, BEFORE merging of UCO Issue 544, add to Investigation's definition:

investigation:Investigation
    rdfs:subClassOf uco-core:Event ;
    .

AFTER merging of Issue 544 (assuming UCO Ontology Committee votes so), subtract this subclassing:

investigation:Investigation
    rdfs:subClassOf uco-core:ContextualCompilation ;
    .

uco-core:object can retain its usage on Investigation, but I suggest this is thanks to a lack of specification, which does not feel future-proofed. This SHACL shape can be added to maintain current data behavior, but Issue 544 could also obviate the property:

investigation:Investigation
    sh:property [
        a sh:PropertyShape ;
        sh:class uco-core:UcoObject ;
        sh:nodeKind sh:IRI ;
        sh:path uco-core:object ;
    ] ;
    .

Note: That shape also omits the minimum-1 constraint on uco-core:object. I am not sure if that constraint was purposefully intended to fail SHACL validation on an investigation containing no objects, or if it was an overzealous translation of an owl:someValuesFrom restriction.

By the time of UCO 2.0.0's release and CASE 2.0.0's release, I think Investigation should no longer be a ContextualCompilation.

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Coordination

• Tracking in Jira ticket ONT-492
• [x] Administrative review completed, proposal announced to Ontology Committees (OCs) on Nov.17, 2023
• [x] Requirements to be discussed in OC meeting, date Nov.28, 2023
• [ ] Requirements Review vote has not occurred