W3C Prov Specifications - A Quick Introduction

 

The W3C Provenance Working Group

Outline

• Why Provenance?
• The W3C Working Group on Provenance
• A Quick Introduction to the Data Model
• An Overview of the Specifications

The Goal

• We should be able to express special “meta” information on the data
  • who played what role in creating the data (author, reviewer, etc.)
  • view of the full revision chain of the data
  • in case of integrated data which part comes from which original data and under what process
  • what vocabularies/ontologies/rules were used to generate some portions of the data
  • etc.

A Definition of Provenance

Lots of application areas need provenance

• Open Information Systems
  • origin of the data, who was responsible for its creation
• Science applications
  • how the results were obtained
• News
  origins and references of blogs, news items
• Law
  • licensing attribution of documents, data
  • privacy information
• Etc.

Provenance is not a new subject

• There has been lot of work around
  • workflow systems
  • databases
  • knowledge representation
  • information retrieval
• There are communities and vocabularies out there
  • Open Provenance Model (OPM)
  • Dublin Core
  • Provenir ontology
  • Provenance vocabulary
  • SWAN provenance ontology
  • etc.

Need to Interchange Provenance

The idea that a single way of representing and collecting provenance could be adopted internally by all systems does not seem to be realistic today.

Instead, a pragmatic approach is to consider a core data model for provenance that allows domain and application specific representations of provenance to be translated into such a data model and exchanged between systems.

Heterogeneous systems can then export their provenance into such a core data model, and applications that need to make sense of provenance in heterogeneous systems can then import it, process it, and reason over it.

Thus, the vision is that different provenance-aware systems natively adopt their own model for representing their provenance, but a core provenance data model can be readily adopted as a provenance interchange model across such systems.

Working Group Charter

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-prov-wg/

Participants

DERI Galway European Broadcasting Union FORTH Financial Services Technology Consortium DFKI IBBT IBM Library of Congress Mayo Clinic NASA OCLC Open Geospatial Consortium OpenLink Software Oracle

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Revelytix, Inc Newcastle University The National Archives TopQuadrant Universidad Politecnica de Madrid University of Aberdeen University of Edinburgh University of Manchester University of Oxford University of Southampton VU University Amsterdam Wright State University

What is PROV?

• PROV is a family of specifications that help define how to interchange provenance
  • PROV-DM, the PROV data model for provenance
  • PROV-CONSTRAINTS, a set of constraints applying to the PROV data model;
  • PROV-O, the PROV ontology, an OWL2 ontology allowing the mapping of PROV to RDF];
  • PROV-N, a notation for provenance aimed at human consumption ;
  • PROV-AQ, the mechanisms for accessing and querying provenance
  • PROV-PRIMER, a primer for the PROV data model

Where should I start?

• The prov-primer provides an overview and introduction to the data model.
• It covers the basic components of the data model from three different perspectives.
• A worked example of using provenance in online news publication.
• The examples cover using prov in RDF Turtle and the PROV-N notation.

PROV Starting Points

Some Other Concepts

PROV contains a variety of other concepts that help express rich provenance

Relation to Dublin Core

• Dublin Core and PROV can be mapped together
• In some areas, PROV expands on Dublin Core allowing for richer provenance
• PROV also adds information that cannot be expressed in Dublin Core.
• A Mappings working draft is at:
  • https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/6b795ed2e6c9/dc-note/Overview.html

Implementations

• There are already a number of implementations using PROV
• Vocabularies
• Software
• See http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ProvImplementations
• We encourage you to mark-up your data using PROV and write software that outputs PROV

Help us make a provenance-aware Web!

Conclusion:

• The Rec Track documents are almost in CR
• Plan is to finish the work in March 2013
• Specifications:

prov-primer	http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/
prov-o	http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/
prov-dm	http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-dm/
prov-constraints	http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-constraints/
prov-n	http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-n/
prov-aq	http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-aq/
prov-sem	work in progress
prov-xml	work in progress
best practice	PROV-DC mapping. work in progress