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 is the conceptual data model that forms a basis for the W3C
provenance (PROV) family of specifications.
PROV-DM distinguishes core structures, forming the essence of provenance information, from
extended structures catering for more specific uses of provenance.
PROV-DM is organized in six components, respectively dealing with:
(1) entities and activities, and the time at which they were created, used, or ended;
(2) derivations of entities from entities;
(3) agents bearing responsibility for entities that were generated and activities that happened;
(4) a notion of bundle, a mechanism to support provenance of provenance;
(5) properties to link entities that refer to the same thing; and,
(6) collections forming a logical structure for its members.
This document 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.
Two further documents complete the specification of PROV-DM.
First, a companion document specifies the set of constraints that
provenance should follow. Second,
a separate document describes a provenance notation for expressing
instances of provenance for human consumption; this notation is used in examples in
this document.
Last Call
This is the fifth public release of the PROV-DM document.
This is a Last Call Working Draft. The design is not expected to change significantly, going forward, and now is the key time for external review.
This specification identifies one feature at risk: Mention (Section 5.5.3) might be removed from PROV if implementation experience reveals problems with supporting this construct.
PROV Family of Specifications
This document is part of the PROV family of specifications, a set of specifications defining various aspects that are necessary to achieve the vision of inter-operable
interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web. The specifications are:
PROV-DM, the PROV data model for provenance (this document);
PROV-CONSTRAINTS, a set of constraints applying to the PROV data model [[PROV-CONSTRAINTS]];
PROV-N, a notation for provenance aimed at human consumption [[PROV-N]];
PROV-O, the PROV ontology, an OWL2 ontology allowing the mapping of PROV to RDF [[PROV-O]];
PROV-AQ, the mechanisms for accessing and querying provenance [[PROV-AQ]];
PROV-PRIMER, a primer for the PROV data model [[PROV-PRIMER]].
How to read the PROV Family of Specifications
The primer is the entry point to PROV offering an introduction to the provenance model.
The Linked Data and Semantic Web community should focus on PROV-O defining PROV classes and properties specified in an OWL2 ontology. For further details, PROV-DM and PROV-CONSTRAINTS specify the constraints applicable to the data model, and its interpretation.
Developers seeking to retrieve or publish provenance should focus on PROV-AQ.
Readers seeking to implement other PROV serializations
should focus on PROV-DM and PROV-CONSTRAINTS. PROV-O and PROV-N offer examples of mapping to RDF and text, respectively.
PROV-DM Types and Relations
Provenance concepts, expressed as PROV-DM types and relations, are organized according to six components that are defined in this section.
The components and their dependencies are illustrated in Figure 4. A component that relies on concepts defined in another is displayed above it in the figure. So, for example, component 5 (alternate) depends on concepts defined in component 4 (bundles), itself dependent on concepts defined in component 1 (entity and activity).
Component 1: entities and activities. The first component consists of entities, activities, and concepts linking them, such as generation, usage, start, end. The first component is the only one comprising time-related concepts.
Component 2: derivations. The second component is formed with derivations and derivation subtypes.
Component 3: agents, responsibility, and influence. The third component consists of agents and concepts ascribing responsibility to agents.
Component 4: bundles. The fourth component is concerned with bundles, a mechanism to support provenance of provenance.
Component 5: alternate. The fifth component consists of relations linking entities referring to the same thing.
Component 6: collections. The sixth component is about collections.
PROV-DM Components
While not all PROV-DM relations are binary, they all involve two primary elements. Hence, Table 4 indexes all relations according to their two primary elements (referred to as subject and object). The table adopts the same color scheme as Figure 4, allowing components to be readily identified.
Note that for simplicity, this table does not include collection-oriented relations.
Relation names appearing in bold correspond to the core structures introduced
in Section 2.1.
The letters 'R' and 'L' appearing in the right-hand side of some cells of Table 4 indicate that attributes
prov:role (TBD)
and
prov:location (TBD)
are permitted for these relations.
The letter 'T' indicates an OPTIONAL time is also permitted.
Some PROV-DM relations are not binary and involve extra optional element. They are summarized in Table 5 grouping secondary objects, according to their type. The table also adopts the same color scheme as Figure 4, allowing components to be readily identified. None of these associations correspond to the core structures introduced
in Section 2.1.
