Modeling of 'Influences' between Artifacts

[mbrush]

The last round of review highlighted the need for a relationship between artifacts where one influenced the creation of the other - to enable inference of 'transitive credit' (a key use case for our model)

To support this, I simple defined a wasInfluencedBy attribute on the Artifact class, defined as "A different artifact that directly or indirectly influenced creation of the artifact of interest". It comes with the following implementation guidance in the spec:

The notion of an ‘Influence’ between two artifacts broadly covers scenarios where one is directly or indirectly used in the creation of another. It is based on the PROV notion of influence - but narrower in that it applies here only between two Artifacts.

Influences include derivations or transformations of material or informational content (e.g. a cell line being derived from a tumor specimen, incorporation of a jpg image into a blog post, a format translation from a JSON dataset to an RDF version of the dataset).

Influences also cover an artifact providing a source of information used to generate an entirely new artifact or conclusion (e.g. a dataset on ice core CO2 levels as evidence for an assertion about arctic climate change, a knockout mouse strain and a dataset from studies using it to measure gene-phenotype associations).

The CDM defines a single, broadly-scoped influencedBy attribute to cover all such scenarios. But implementations MAY define specializations of this attribute with more constrained meaning - e.g. derivedFrom, _informedB_y, providesEvidenceFor, etc.

@mellybelly please comment/provide feedback. And feel free to revise the spec directly.

[mellybelly]

Matt I like the examples and I think this exactly covers the specific use case. I also like keeping things generic for now, and then we can see what sort of community requirements come to pass.