Five Provenance Drafts Published

The Provenance Working Group published 5 Working Drafts today related to the PROV data model. Provenance information can be used for many purposes, such as understanding how data was collected so it can be meaningfully used, determining ownership and rights over an object, making judgments about information to determine whether to trust it, verifying that the process and steps used to obtain a result complies with given requirements, and reproducing how something was generated. The PROV model is used to represent provenance records, which contain descriptions of the entities and activities involved in producing and delivering or otherwise influencing a given object.

• PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model introduces the provenance concepts found in PROV and defines PROV-DM types and relations.
• Constraints of the Provenance Data Model introduces a further set of concepts useful for understanding the PROV data model and defines inferences that are allowed on provenance statements and validity constraints that PROV instances should follow. These inferences and constraints are useful for readers who develop applications that generate provenance or reason over provenance. (First Public Working Draft)
• PROV-N: The Provenance Notation allows serializations of PROV instances to be created in a compact manner. (First Public Working Draft)
• PROV-O: The PROV Ontology expresses the PROV Data Model using the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2).
• PROV Model Primer provides an intuitive introduction and guide to the PROV specification for provenance on the Web.