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A Formal Account of the Open Provenance Model

A Formal Account of the Open Provenance Model
A Formal Account of the Open Provenance Model
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 paper 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 paper 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.
Provenance, Temporal reasoning, World Wide Web
Kwasnikowska, Natalia
bd61e3ba-63c8-473e-9791-99ece51ac98d
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Van den Bussche, Jan
36be6c66-7250-4a26-8966-f186b289d156
Kwasnikowska, Natalia
bd61e3ba-63c8-473e-9791-99ece51ac98d
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Van den Bussche, Jan
36be6c66-7250-4a26-8966-f186b289d156

Kwasnikowska, Natalia, Moreau, Luc and Van den Bussche, Jan (2015) A Formal Account of the Open Provenance Model. ACM Transactions on the Web, 9 (2). (doi:10.1145/2734116).

Record type: Article

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 paper 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 paper 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.

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Accepted/In Press date: February 2015
Published date: May 2015
Keywords: Provenance, Temporal reasoning, World Wide Web
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 271819
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/271819
PURE UUID: 9523177d-ebf7-4fa4-983f-199635de3a80
ORCID for Luc Moreau: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3494-120X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 20 Dec 2010 10:56
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:39

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Contributors

Author: Natalia Kwasnikowska
Author: Luc Moreau ORCID iD
Author: Jan Van den Bussche

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