Incubator Group Report: Provenance XG Final Report

The W3C Provenance Incubator Group has published their final report. The provenance of information is crucial to making determinations about whether information is trusted, how to integrate diverse information sources, and how to give credit to originators when reusing information. The report highlights the importance of provenance and presents requirements in a variety of contexts in the Web based on use cases collected from the community. Based on these requirements and a close examination of existing provenance work, the XG identified the need for standard mechanisms to represent and access provenance. The group formulated a roadmap for provenance on the Web that includes short term and long term priorities. The group also agreed to concrete starting points to ensure rapid progress towards a standardization effort, and proposed a charter for a Provenance Interchange Working Group. This publication is part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C Members can innovate and experiment. This work is not on the W3C standards track.