This document provides an overview of the PROV provenance model and some of its extensions. It discusses the motivation for provenance, the history and development of the PROV model, its key concepts of entities, activities, and agents. It also describes extensions like ProvONE and PAV that build upon PROV to model workflow and scientific provenance.

1. A Sightseeing Tour of
PROV and Some of its
Extensions
Khalid Belhajjame
LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine
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2. Why do we care about provenance
…
 Help explain results and outliers
 Assess trust and quality
 Promote systems transparency: users are able to
determine whether a particular use of information is
appropriate under a set of rules.
 Assist in debugging
 Promote reuse and reproducibility
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3. A bit of History
Provenance is not a new topic. There has been a lot of
provenance work in:
 Databases, Workflows, Information retrieval, ….
 By 2009, there have been a number of models/vocabularies
for expressing provenance information
 Open Provenance Model (OPM),
 Proof Markup Language (PML),
 Provenance Vocabulary,
 PREservation Metadata : Implementation Strategies
(PREMIS),
 Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (SWAN)
Ontology,
 Dublin Core, ….
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4. A bit of History
 2009-2010: W3C Provenance Provenance Incubator Group
 Objective: provides a state of the art and possible
recommendations for standardization efforts
 2011: W3C Provenance Working Group
 Objective: To define a standard vocabulary primarily for
the semantic Web
 2013: The W3C Provenance Working Group published a
number of PROV recommendations and notes:
 PROV-DM, PROV-O, …
 Since then a number of models and vocabularies have
extended and/or defined mapping rules to PROV
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5. Family of PROV
documents
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6. Family of PROV
documents
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7. Provenance
The W3C Provenance Working Group defined provenance
as:
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.
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8. PROV…
is not a recommendation for representing and
collecting provenance information that should be
adopted internally by all systems.
 That is not realistic, and won’t happen any time soon
Instead, the aim to facilitate and promote
interoperability between domains and applications that
adopt their specific representations of provenance.
 More pragmatic, and thus likely to happen.
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9. Example
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10. PROV Core Structures
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11. Entity
 An entity is a physical, digital, conceptual, or other
kind of thing with some fixed aspects; entities may
be real or imaginary.
 Example: An entity may be the document at IRI
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-
17526723, a file in a file system, a car, or an idea.
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12. Activity
 An activity is something that occurs over a period of
time and acts upon or with entities; it may include
consuming, processing, transforming, modifying,
relocating, using, or generating entities.
 Example: An activity may be the publishing of a
document on the Web, sending a twitter message,
extracting metadata embedded in a file, driving a
car from Paris to Lyon, etc.
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13. Agent
 An agent is something that bears some form of
responsibility for an activity taking place, for the
existence of an entity, or for another agent's activity.
 Example: A site selling books on the Web and the
companies hosting them can be seen as agents.
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14. Usage and Generation
 Usage is the beginning of utilizing an entity by an
activity. Before usage, the activity had not begun to
utilize this entity and could not have been affected
by the entity.
 Example: A program beginning to read an input file
 Generation is the completion of production of a new
entity by an activity. This entity did not exist before
generation and becomes available for usage after
this generation.
 Example: the completed creation of a file by a
program
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15. Derivation
 Derivation is a transformation of an entity into
another, an update of an entity resulting in a new
one, or the construction of a new entity based on a
pre-existing entity.
 Example: The transformation of a relational table
into a linked data set
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16. Association and Attribution
 An activity association is an assignment of
responsibility to an agent for an activity, indicating
that the agent had a role in the activity
 Example: the workflow system is responsible for the
enactment of a workflow execution
 Attribution is the ascribing of an entity to an agent.
 Example: A blog post can be attributed to an author,
a mobile phone to its manufacturer.
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17. PROV Core Structures
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18. W3C PROV Implementations:
Preliminary Analysis
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Source: https://khalidbelhajjame.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/w3c-prov-implementations/

19. PROV Compliant
Vocabularies
This is by no mean complete ….
PRO
V
ProvONE
wfprov
wfdescc
DC
PAV
extends
extends
c
extends
mapsTo
mapsTo
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20. Prospective provenance
Retrospective
provenance
ProvONE: A PROV Extension Data
Model for Scientific Workflow Provenance
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21. PAV ontology:
provenance, authoring and versioning
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22. PAV ontology:
provenance, authoring and versioning
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23. Acknowledgements
 W3C Provenance Working Group
 DataONE Workflow and Provenance Interest Group
 PAV’s friends: Paolo Ciccarese, Stian Soiland-
Reyes, Alasdair JG Gray, Carole Goble and Tim
Clark
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24. A Sightseeing Tour of
PROV and Some of its
Extensions
Khalid Belhajjame
LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine
16/03/16 MADICS: ReProVirtuFlow 24