A canonical form for PROV documents and its application to equality, signature, and validation

Moreau, Luc (2017) A canonical form for PROV documents and its application to equality, signature, and validation. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 17 (4), [35]. (doi:10.1145/3032990).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We present a canonical form for PROV that is a normalized way of representing PROV documents as mathematical expressions. As opposed to the normal form specified by the PROV-CONSTRAINTS recommendation, the canonical form we present is defined for all PROV documents, irrespective of their validity, and it can be serialized in a unique way. The article makes the case for a canonical form for PROV and its potential uses, namely: comparison of PROV documents in different formats, validation, and signature of PROV documents. A signature of a PROV document allows the integrity and the author of provenance to be ascertained; since the signature is based on the canonical form, these checks are not tied to a particular encoding, but can be performed on any representation of PROV.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 12 December 2016

e-pub ahead of print date: 18 September 2017

Additional Information: Funded by EPSRC: The use of interactive electronic-books in the teaching and application of modern quantitative methods in the social sciences (ES/K007246/1)

Organisations: Web & Internet Science