Provenance is a critical ingredient for establishing trust of published
scientific content. This is true whether we are considering a data set, a
computational workflow, a peer-reviewed publication or a simple scientific
claim with supportive evidence. Existing vocabularies such as DC Terms and the
W3C PROV-O are domain-independent and general-purpose and they allow and
encourage for extensions to cover more specific needs. We identify the specific
need for identifying or distinguishing between the various roles assumed by
agents manipulating digital artifacts, such as author, contributor and curator.
We present the Provenance, Authoring and Versioning ontology (PAV): a
lightweight ontology for capturing just enough descriptions essential for
tracking the provenance, authoring and versioning of web resources. We argue
that such descriptions are essential for digital scientific content. PAV
distinguishes between contributors, authors and curators of content and
creators of representations in addition to the provenance of originating
resources that have been accessed, transformed and consumed. We explore five
projects (and communities) that have adopted PAV illustrating their usage
through concrete examples. Moreover, we present mappings that show how PAV
extends the PROV-O ontology to support broader interoperability.
The authors strived to keep PAV lightweight and compact by including only
those terms that have demonstrated to be pragmatically useful in existing
applications, and by recommending terms from existing ontologies when
plausible.
We analyze and compare PAV with related approaches, namely Provenance
Vocabulary, DC Terms and BIBFRAME. We identify similarities and analyze their
differences with PAV, outlining strengths and weaknesses of our proposed model.
We specify SKOS mappings that align PAV with DC Terms.Comment: 22 pages (incl 5 tables and 19 figures). Submitted to Journal of
Biomedical Semantics 2013-04-26 (#1858276535979415). Revised article
submitted 2013-08-30. Second revised article submitted 2013-10-06. Accepted
2013-10-07. Author proofs sent 2013-10-09 and 2013-10-16. Published
2013-11-22. Final version 2013-12-06.
http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/4/1/3