W3C

Provenance Interchange Working Group Charter

The mission of the Provenance Working Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to support the widespread publication and use of provenance information of Web documents, data, and resources. The Working Group will publish W3C Recommendations that define a language for exchanging provenance information among applications.

Join the Provenance Working Group.

End date 30 September 2013
Confidentiality Proceedings are public
Initial Chairs Luc Moreau, University of Southampton
Paul Groth, VU University Amsterdam
Initial Team Contacts
(FTE %: 20)		 Ivan Herman (updated)
Usual Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: Weekly
Face-to-face: Once Annually

Background

Provenance refers to the sources of information, such as entities and processes, involved in producing or delivering an artifact. Over time, multiple techniques to capture and represent various forms of provenance have been devised, and are sometimes known under the names of lineage, pedigree, proof, or traceability. The provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, users find information that is often contradictory or questionable. People make trust judgments based on provenance that may or may not be explicitly offered to them. The lack of a standard model is a significant impediment to realizing such applications.

The W3C Provenance Incubator Group identified rapidly growing needs for provenance in social, scientific, industry, and government contexts involving data and information integration across the Web. As indicated in the Incubator Group´s report, however, many provenance models exist with significantly different expressivity, fundamentally different assumptions about the system they are embedded in, and radically different performance impact. The idea that a single way of representing and collecting provenance could be adopted internally by all systems does not seem to be realistic today.

A pragmatic approach is to consider a core provenance language with an extension mechanisms that allow any provenance model to be translated into such a lingua franca and exchanged between systems. Heterogeneous systems can then export their provenance into such a core language, and applications that need to make sense of provenance in heterogeneous systems can then import it and reason over it.

Scope

The Provenance Interchange Working Group has the following objective: to define a provenance interchange language and define methods to publish and access provenance using that language. For the purpose of this charter, we refer to the provenance interchange language to be defined as “PIL”. The Working Group will select an appropriate name for the language.

PIL should

Drawing on existing vocabularies/ontologies (namely: Changeset Vocabulary, Dublin Core, Open Provenance Model (OPM), PREMIS, Proof Markup Language (PML), Provenance Vocabulary, Provenir ontology, SWAN Provenance Ontology, Semantic Web Publishing Vocabulary, WOT Schema; see also the Incubator Group Report for a more detailed description of those), the Incubator Group has identified a set of concepts that will constitute the core of PIL (see Section 8.1.4 of the Incubator Group report). The number of concepts is intentionally limited, so as to ensure a cohesive and tractable core. Other concepts can be relevant to provenance, but it is anticipated that they would be defined by means of the envisaged extension mechanism of PIL.

Deliverables

(The titles of the documents are indicative only.)

Comments about the deliverables:

The Working Group will leverage the activities of the W3C Provenance Incubator Group, its understanding of the state-of-the-art, extensive requirements capture, use cases and flagship scenarios, and mapping of provenance vocabularies.

Milestones
Specification FPWD LC CR PR Rec or Note
D1 (PIL Conceptual Model , Recommendation) T+6 T+9 T+12 T+15 T+18
D2 (PIL Formal Model, Recommendation) T+6 T+9 T+12 T+15 T+18
D3 (PIL Formal Semantics, Optional WG Note) T+12 T+18 n/a n/a T+18
D4 (Accessing and Querying Provenance, WG Note) T+9 T+18 n/a n/a T+18
D5 (PIL XML Serialization, WG Note) T+9 T+18 n/a n/a T+18
D6 (PIL Best Practice Cookbook, WG Note) T+15 T+18 n/a n/a T+18
D7 (PIL Primer, WG Note) T+12 T+18 n/a n/a T+18

Timeline View Summary

  • T: First teleconference
  • T+6: First face-to-face meeting
  • T+6: First Public Working Draft for the Conceptual Model of PIL
  • T+6: First Public Working Draft for the Formal Model of PIL
  • T+9: First Public Working Draft for the note on Accessing and Querying Provenance
  • T+9: First Public Working Draft for the PIL XML Serialization
  • T+9: Last Call Working Draft for the Conceptual Model of PIL
  • T+9: Last Call Working Draft for the Formal Model of PIL
  • T+12: Last Call Working Draft for the PIL XML Serialization
  • T+12: First Public Working Draft for PIL Formal Semantics (optional)
  • T+12: Candidate Recommendation for the Conceptual Model of PIL
  • T+12: Candidate Recommendation for the Formal Model of PIL
  • T+15: Last Call Working Draft of the note on Accessing and Querying Provenance
  • T+15: Proposed Recommendation for the Conceptual Model of PIL
  • T+15: Proposed Recommendation for the Formal Model of PIL
  • T+18: Recommendation of the Conceptual Model of PIL published
  • T+18: Recommendation of the Formal Model of PIL published
  • T+18: Working Group Note on the PIL Formal Semantics published (optional)
  • T+18: Working Group Note on Accessing and Querying Provenance published
  • T+18: Working Group Note on the PIL XML Serialization published
  • T+18: Working Group Note on the PIL Primer published
  • T+18: Working Group Note on the PIL Best Practice Cookbook published

Dependencies and Liaisons

W3C Groups

Semantic Web Coordination Group
To ensure that the development of PIL is coordinated with other Semantic Web groups
RDFa Working Group
To ensure that the RDFa usage of PIL is according to the latest version of RDFa
Internationalization Activity
To ensure that the terms and relationships defined by PIL are usable in an international setting
RDF Working Group
To ensure that the Graph Identification feature, to be developed by the RDF Working Group, is correctly used for Provenance purposes, and it covers all the needs of Provenance.

External Groups

DCMI Metadata Provenance Task Group
The Task Group defines an relevant application profile; the approach, terms, and vocabulary used for that profile should be interchangable via PIL

Participation

To be successful, the Provenance Working Group is expected to have 8 or more active participants for its duration. Effective participation to Provenance Working Group is expected to consume one work day per week for each participant; two days per weekfor editors. The Provenance Working Group will allocate also the necessary resources for building Test Suites for each specification.

Participants are reminded of the Good Standing requirements of the W3C Process.

Communication

This group primarily conducts its work on the public mailing list public-prov@w3.org (with publicly visible archive).

Information about the group (deliverables, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Provenance Working Group home page.

Actions Beyond the Working Group

Once its work completed, the Working Group will set up a dedicated community structure (e.g., dedicated mailing list, separate Wiki pages, etc.) to keep up the community’s cooperation on the subject. That structure will also be active in collecting errata for the Recommendation, but will also be a forum where users of the technology can exchange their ideas, experiences, and possibly provide direction for further activities in this area.

Decision Policy

As explained in the Process Document ( section 3.3), this group will seek to make decisions when there is consensus. When the Chair puts a question and observes dissent, after due consideration of different opinions, the Chair should record a decision (possibly after a formal vote) and any objections, and move on.

This charter is written in accordance with Section 3.4, Votes of the W3C Process Document and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.

For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

About this Charter

This charter for the Provenance Working Group has been created according to section 6.2of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Changes compared to the original charter (see also diff file):

The first draft of the charter was part of the Provenance XG Final Report, edited by Yolanda Gil, James Cheney, Paul Groth, Olaf Hargig, Simon Miles, Luc Moreau, and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. The final version was edited by Ivan Herman, W3C.

Copyright© 2011 W3C ®( MIT , ERCIM , Keio), All Rights Reserved.

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