Last Call: Constraints of the Provenance Data Model

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Ivan Herman

The W3C Provenance Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Constraints of the Provenance Data Model. This document defines a subset of PROV instances called valid PROV instances. The intent of validation is ensure that a PROV instance represents a history of objects and their interactions which is consistent, and thus safe to use for the purpose of logical reasoning and other kinds of analysis. Valid PROV instances satisfy certain definitions, inferences, and constraints. These definitions, inferences, and constraints provide a measure of consistency checking for provenance and reasoning over provenance. They can also be used to normalize PROV instances to forms that can easily be compared in order to determine whether two PROV instances are equivalent. Validity and equivalence are also defined for PROV bundles and documents. Comments are welcome through 10 October.

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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.

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