FAIRsharing record for: W3C Provenance Data Model

This FAIRsharing record describes: PROV-DM defines a conceptual data model for provenance including UML diagrams. PROV-O, PROV-XML and PROV-N are serializations of this conceptual model. A companion document, PROV-CONSTRAINTS, is linked within this record and specifies the set of constraints that provenance should follow. PROV-DM and PROV-O define how to represent provenance on the World Wide Web, and as such additional documentation has been included in this record for PROV-AQ (Access and Query), a note which describes how standard web protocols may be used to locate, retrieve and query provenance records. PROV-Dictionary is also referenced within this record, and describes Dictionary, a specific type of Collection with a logical structure consisting of key-entity pairs and created to facilitate the modeling of provenance for dictionary data structures. PROV-SEM, a model-theoretic semantics for the PROV data model, is also linked. Bundles of provenance descriptions can be linked by PROV-LINKS, also listed below. For the purpose of this specification, provenance is defined as a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing. In particular, the provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, where users find information that is often contradictory or questionable, provenance can help those users to make trust judgements.