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PROV-Overview: An Overview of the PROV Family of Documents

Type: ./types/snapshot.md · Tags: documentation

Author: Paul Groth (VU University Amsterdam), Luc Moreau (University of Southampton) — editors Source: https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview/ Date: 30 April 2013

Abstract

Provenance describes "information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing" and can assess quality, reliability, and trustworthiness. The PROV Family of Documents enables interoperable provenance interchange across heterogeneous web environments through standardized models and serializations.

Introduction

PROV stems from the Provenance Incubator Group's recommendations supporting eight core requirements:

  1. Identifying objects and attributing them to persons/entities
  2. Accessing provenance in other standards
  3. Retrieving provenance information
  4. Representing provenance of provenance
  5. Enabling reproducibility
  6. Supporting versioning
  7. Representing procedures
  8. Modeling derivation

Document Roadmap

The PROV family comprises 12 documents organized by audience:

  • Users: PROV-PRIMER (entry point for learning the data model)
  • Developers: PROV-O (OWL2 ontology), PROV-XML (XML schema), PROV-AQ (access/query mechanisms), PROV-DC (Dublin Core mapping), PROV-DICTIONARY (dictionary structures)
  • Advanced: PROV-DM (conceptual model), PROV-N (human-readable notation), PROV-CONSTRAINTS (validation rules), PROV-SEM (first-order logic semantics), PROV-LINKS (bundle linking)

Namespace

All PROV terms use the namespace http://www.w3.org/ns/prov# with the prefix prov.