Provenance 4th Face-to-Face Working Group Meeting

After an intense and fun week at the International Semantic Web Conference, I wanted to bring you up to date with the fourth face-to-face meeting of the Provenance Working Group. The meeting was held the two days before the start of ISWC and hosted by the W3C in their offices. We had 12 in-person participants and several who attended remotely on the phone.

The meeting was very productive. We resolved the last major outstanding issue in the PROV data model around the concept of mentionOf, which was designed to connect bundles of provenance together. Many in the working group felt that the concept was extremely useful in applications where provenance is collected by multiple parties over time, however, others felt that the concept was not precise nor well-understood. In the end, the group felt that it was too early to standardize the concept and instead agreed to produce a note and see if the community would use it. In addition, to this, we also resolved some other issues and went through the responses to public comments.

Getting ready for Candidate Recommendation

Importantly, we resolved to get ready for candidate recommendation on all of our major recommendations including the PROV data model, ontology, notation and constraints. In the coming weeks, you'll see an announcement about this. This is an exciting moment as we believe the work is solid and ready for implementation.

Outreach

At the meeting we discussed outreach and in particular getting implementations. From an informal poll of the working group participants, we think we will have enough implementations to satisfy the requirements to go to proposed recommendation. In addition, we know from ISWC that a number of people are implementing as well. However, we want PROV to be widely adopted, so we hope you take the opportunity to implement the specifications and provide us an implementation report about your usage (more detail soon!). We are also in the process of adding additional material to make PROV easier to get into and also answer some frequently asked questions about it.

Thanks to our Reviewers

We've had quite a few public comments about the specs. Thanks to their comments, we have a much better set of documents.

Expect more announcements from us very soon as we make the final preparations leading to our next release of documents.