Abstract
On the Web, where resources such as documents and data are published, shared, transformed, and republished, provenance is a crucial piece of metadata that would allow users to place their trust in the resources they access. The open provenance model (OPM) is a community data model for provenance that is designed to facilitate the meaningful interchange of provenance information between systems. Underpinning OPM is a notion of directed graph, where nodes represent data products and processes involved in past computations and edges represent dependencies between them; it is complemented by graphical inference rules allowing new dependencies to be derived. Until now, however, the OPM model was a purely syntactical endeavor. The present article extends OPM graphs with an explicit distinction between precise and imprecise edges. Then a formal semantics for the thus enriched OPM graphs is proposed, by viewing OPM graphs as temporal theories on the temporal events represented in the graph. The original OPM inference rules are scrutinized in view of the semantics and found to be sound but incomplete. An extended set of graphical rules is provided and proved to be complete for inference. The article concludes with applications of the formal semantics to inferencing in OPM graphs, operators on OPM graphs, and a formal notion of refinement among OPM graphs.
Highlights
In the fine arts and in digital libraries, provenance respectively refers to the documented history of an art object, or the documentation of processes in a digital object’s life cycle [24]
The purpose of this section is to provide a temporal semantics to Open Provenance Model (OPM) graphs, the data structure introduced in the reference specification
The Open Provenance Model is a data model for provenance that is issued from requirements from a community of practitioners involved in the Provenance Challenge activity
Summary
In the fine arts and in digital libraries, provenance respectively refers to the documented history of an art object, or the documentation of processes in a digital object’s life cycle [24]. In the course of a series of inter-operability Provenance Challenges [21, 29], a data model for exchanging provenance information has been designed, implemented and used in practice This data model, referred to as the Open Provenance Model (OPM) [20], has already undergone several revisions, using an open-source like governance mechanism to manage changes. A criticism of the Open Provenance Model is that it does not provide a formal semantics [4]: the lack of unambiguous concept definition potentially hinders the development of mappings [26] to other provenance languages, and can challenge inter-operability of systems. We formalize the notion of an OPM graph, and equip it with a temporal theory This kind of semantics maps an OPM graph to a set of ordering constraints between time-points.
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