PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model

TLDR

Provenance records information about entities, activities, and agents that produce data, enabling quality and trust assessments, and PROV‑DM is a domain‑agnostic conceptual data model that defines core and extended structures across six components—entities, derivations, agents, bundles, properties, and collections—to underpin the W3C PROV specifications. This document introduces PROV concepts and defines PROV‑DM types and relations, with two additional documents completing the specification. The document outlines PROV concepts and defines PROV‑DM types and relations, while companion documents specify constraints and provide a human‑readable notation for expressing provenance instances.

Abstract

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. PROV-DM is the conceptual data model that forms a basis for the W3C provenance (PROV) family of specifications. PROV-DM distinguishes core structures, forming the essence of provenance information, from extended structures catering for more specific uses of provenance. PROV-DM is organized in six components, respectively dealing with: (1) entities and activities, and the time at which they were created, used, or ended; (2) derivations of entities from entities; (3) agents bearing responsibility for entities that were generated and activities that happened; (4) a notion of bundle, a mechanism to support provenance of provenance; (5) properties to link entities that refer to the same thing; and, (6) collections forming a logical structure for its members. This document introduces the provenance concepts found in PROV and defines PROV-DM types and relations. The PROV data model is domain-agnostic, but is equipped with extensibility points allowing domain-specific information to be included. Two further documents complete the specification of PROV-DM. First, a companion document specifies the set of constraints that provenance should follow. Second, a separate document describes a provenance notation for expressing instances of provenance for human consumption; this notation is used in examples in this document.