This document describes how provenance information can be modeled, stored and exchanged within the astronomical community in a standardized way. We follow the definition of provenance as proposed by the W3C 1 , i.e. that "provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness." Such provenance information in astronomy is important to enable any scientist to trace back the origin of a dataset (e.g. an image, spectrum, catalog or single points in a spectral energy distribution diagram or a light curve), a document (e.g. an article, a technical note) or a device (e.g. a camera, a telescope), learn about the people and organizations involved in a project and assess the reliability, quality as well as the usefulness of the dataset, document or device for her own scientific work. Status of this documentThis document has been reviewed by IVOA Members and other interested parties, and has been endorsed by the IVOA Executive Committee as an IVOA Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference from another document. IVOA's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability inside the Astronomical Community.A list of current IVOA Recommendations and other technical documents can be found at http://www.ivoa.net/documents/.

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