The W3C Provenance Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of The PROV Ontology: Model and Formal Semantics. The PROV Ontology (also known as PROV-O) encodes the PROV Data Model in the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). The PROV ontology consists of a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent provenance information. The PROV ontology can also be specialized to create new classes and properties for modeling provenance information specific to different domain applications. The PROV ontology supports a set of entailments based on OWL2 formal semantics and provenance specific inference rules. The PROV ontology is available for download as a separate OWL2 document.
About Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.
