CRMdig: A Generic Digital Provenance Model for Scientific Observation.

Abstract

The systematic large-scale production of digital scientific objects, the diversity of the processes involved and the complexity of describing historical relationships among them, imposes the need for an innovative knowledge management system capable to handle all the semantic information in order to monitor, manage and document the origins and derivation of products in a flexible manner. We have implemented CRMdig, an extension of the CIDOC-CRM ontology, which is able to capture the modeling and the query requirements regarding the provenance of digital objects for e-science. CRMdig is particularly rich in describing the physical circumstances of scientific observation resulting in digital data.