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. The PROV Family of Documents defines a model, corresponding serializations and other supporting definitions to enable the inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web. This document provides an overview of this family of documents.

PROV Family of Documents

• PROV-OVERVIEW (Note), an overview of the PROV family of documents (this document);
• PROV-PRIMER (Note), a primer for the PROV data model [[PROV-PRIMER]];
• PROV-O (Recommendation), the PROV ontology, an OWL2 ontology allowing the mapping of the PROV data model to RDF [[PROV-O]];
• PROV-DM (Recommendation), the PROV data model for provenance [[PROV-DM]];
• PROV-N (Recommendation), a notation for provenance aimed at human consumption [[PROV-N]];
• PROV-CONSTRAINTS (Recommendation), a set of constraints applying to the PROV data model [[PROV-CONSTRAINTS]];
• PROV-XML (Note), an XML schema for the PROV data model [[PROV-XML]];
• PROV-AQ (Note), mechanisms for accessing and querying provenance [[PROV-AQ]];
• PROV-DICTIONARY (Note) introduces a specific type of collection, consisting of key-entity pairs [[PROV-DICTIONARY]];
• PROV-DC (Note) provides a mapping between PROV-O and Dublin Core Terms [[PROV-DC]];
• PROV-SEM (Note), a declarative specification in terms of first-order logic of the PROV data model [[PROV-SEM]];
• PROV-LINKS (Note) introduces a mechanism to link across bundles [[PROV-LINKS]].

Implementations Encouraged

The Provenance Working Group encourages implementation of the specifications overviewed in this document. Although work on this document by the Provenance Working Group is complete, errors may be recorded in the errata and these may be addressed in future revisions.

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Introduction

The design of PROV stems from the recommendations of the Provenance Incubator Group ([[PROV-XG]]) which performed an extensive information gathering process including use case cataloging, requirements elicitation and a literature survey. From this process, 8 broad recommendations were defined. Summarizing, the report recommends that a provenance framework should support:

1. the core concepts of identifying an object, attributing the object to person or entity, and representing processing steps;
2. accessing provenance-related information expressed in other standards;
3. accessing provenance;
4. the provenance of provenance;
5. reproducibility;
6. versioning;
7. representing procedures;
8. and representing derivation.

Figure 1 shows the organization of PROV and how the documents (roughly) depend on each other. The coloring scheme corresponds to the document roadmap below.

At its core is a conceptual data model (PROV-DM), which defines a common vocabulary used to describe provenance. This is instantiated by various serializations. These serializations are used by implementations to interchange provenance. To help developers and users express valid provenance, a set of constraints (PROV-Constraints) are defined, which can be used to implement provenance validators. This is complimented by a formal semantics (PROV-SEM). Finally, to further support the interchange of provenance, additional specifications are provided for protocols to locate and access provenance (PROV-AQ), connect bundles of provenance descriptions (PROV-Links), represent dictionary style collections (PROV-Dictionary) and define how to interoperate with the widely used Dublin Core vocabulary (PROV-DC).

Document Roadmap

1. Users - this audience wants to understand PROV and use applications that support PROV.
2. Developers - this audience wants to develop or build applications that create and consume provenance using PROV.
3. Advanced - this audience aims to create validators, new PROV serializations, or other advanced provenance-based systems.

In the table below and Figure 1, we denote whether the document is a W3C Recommendation or a Working Group Note. In Figure 1, bold bordered boxes signal a W3C Recommendation.

Namespace

Additional Information

1. An Overview of Provenance on the Web (slideshow - pdf)
2. Requirements for Provenance on the Web
3. State of the Art Report