Three Provenance Last Call Drafts Published

24 July 2012

The Provenance Working Group published three Last Call Working Drafts . Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.

• PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model introduces the provenance concepts found in PROV and defines PROV-DM types and relations. The PROV data model is domain-agnostic, but is equipped with extensibility points allowing domain-specific information to be included.
• PROV-O: The PROV Ontology expresses the PROV Data Model using the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). It provides a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent and interchange provenance information generated in different systems and under different contexts. It can also be specialized to create new classes and properties to model provenance information for different applications and domains.
• PROV-N: The Provenance Notation is introduced to provide examples of the PROV data model: aimed at human consumption, PROV-N allows serializations of PROV instances to be created in a compact manner. PROV-N facilitates the mapping of the PROV data model to concrete syntax, and is used as the basis for a formal semantics of PROV. The purpose of this document is to define the PROV-N notation.

Comments on the Last Call Working Drafts are welcome through 18 September. The group also published a Working Draft of PROV Model Primer, which provides an intuitive introduction and guide to the PROV specification for provenance on the Web. The primer is intended as a starting point for those wishing to create or use PROV data. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.