PROV (Provenance)

The core concepts defined by the PROV Model are Entity, Activity and Agent.[4] The remaining concepts are relationships between these (e.g. Derivation, Usage, Generation) or specializations (e.g. Person, Collection, Plan).

An Entity captures a thing in the world (in a particular state). The entity was derived from some other entity, and was generated by an Activity that used other entities.

An Agent (e.g. a person or software execution) was associated with the activity, and the entity that was generated by the activity was attributed to that agent.

Provenance statements can be serialized in different PROV formats, while expressing the same PROV model. Some of the PROV types and relationship names have slight variations from the PROV model concepts to be idiomatic to the format.

For example, PROV-N is a textual format that has a direct mapping to the PROV model:

document
 prefix ex <http://example.com/>

 entity(ex:e1)

 activity(ex:a2, 2011-11-16T16:00:00, 2011-11-16T16:00:01)

 wasGeneratedBy(ex:e1, ex:a2, -)

endDocument

The above can be expressed as XML using the PROV-XML schema:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<prov:document xmlns:prov="http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#"
               xmlns:ex="http://example.com/">

    <prov:entity prov:id="ex:e1"/>

    <prov:activity prov:id="ex:a2">
        <prov:startTime>2011-11-16T16:00:00.000Z</prov:startTime>
        <prov:endTime>2011-11-16T16:00:01.000Z</prov:endTime>
    </prov:activity>

    <prov:wasGeneratedBy>
        <prov:entity prov:ref="ex:e1"/>
        <prov:activity prov:ref="ex:a2"/>
    </prov:wasGeneratedBy>

</prov:document>

Using the PROV-O mapping to the OWL2 ontology language, which again can be serialized in the RDF format Turtle:

@prefix prov: <http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix ex: <http://example.com/> .

ex:e1 a prov:Entity .

ex:a2 a prov:Activity ;
	prov:startedAtTime "2011-11-16T16:00:00.000Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
	prov:endedAtTime "2011-11-16T16:00:01.000Z"^^xsd:dateTime .

ex:e1 prov:wasGeneratedBy ex:a2 .

Software tools have been developed to help converting between PROV formats and to generate/parse PROV documents in different programming languages:

• PROV Translator - web service
• PROV Toolbox - Java API and command line tool
• PROV Python library - Python API