Entities are things in the world one wants to provide provenance for. For the purpose of this specification, things can be physical, digital, conceptual, or otherwise; the world may be real or imaginary.
An activity is anything that can operate on entities. In particular, activities may produce, consume, or transform an entity. Activities that operate on digital entities may for example move, copy, or duplicate them. An agent is a type of entity that can be associated to an activity, to indicate that it bears some form of responsibility for the activity taking place. Generation is the completed production of a new entity by activity. This entity become available for usage after this generation. This entity did not exist before generation. Usage is the beginning on an entity being consumed by an activity. Before usage, the activity had not begun to consume or use to this entity (and could not have been affected by the entity). Derivation is something by which some entity is transformed from, created from, or affected by another entity in the world. A plan is an entity that represent a set of actions or steps intended by one or more agents to achieve some goals. A collection is an entity that has internal structure. An accountEntity is an entity that is contains a bundle of provenance assertions. Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities, involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing in the world. A responsibility chain is a relation between two agents, indicating that a "subordinate" agent acted on behalf of a "responsible" agent, in the context of an activity. An activity association is an assignment of responsibility to an agent for an activity, indicating that the agent had an active role in the activity. It further allows for a plan to be specified, which is the plan intended by the agent to achieve some goals in the context of this activity. An entity generation event is the instantaneous event that marks the final instant of an entity's creation timespan, after which it is no longer available for use. An entity usage event is the instantaneous event that marks the first instant of an entity's consumption timespan by an activity. An entity destruction event is the instantaneous event that marks the initial instant of an entity's destruction timespan, after which it no longer becomes available for use. An activity start event is the instantaneous event that marks the instant an activity starts. An activity end event is the instantaneous event that marks the instant an activity ends. An instantaneous event, or event for short, happens in the world and marks a change in the world, in its activities and in its entities.