PROV-O — W3C Provenance Ontology
Overview
PROV-O is a standard ontology from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for representing provenance, meaning the documented history of how a piece of data was created, by whom, using what process, and from which inputs. Published as a W3C Recommendation in 2013, it provides a minimal vocabulary for recording data lineage in a machine-readable, interoperable way. PROV-O is the formal foundation on which NIDM (Neuroimaging Data Model) is built: NIDM extends PROV-O with neuroscience-specific terms to track the full computational history of a neuroimaging analysis.
Core Model
Three fundamental classes:
| Class | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
prov:Entity | A piece of data or a thing | An fMRI dataset, a statistical map |
prov:Activity | A process that used or generated entities | An fMRI preprocessing pipeline |
prov:Agent | A person, software, or organisation responsible | A researcher, FSL software |
Key relationships: wasGeneratedBy, used, wasAttributedTo, wasDerivedFrom, wasAssociatedWith
Connections
Resources
- https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/
- https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/ (accessible introduction)
- http://nidm.nidash.org (NIDM, built on PROV-O)