A Formal Account of the Open Provenance Model

Abstract

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, used to represent data products and processes involved in past computations, and dependencies between them; it is complemented by inference rules allowing new dependencies to be derived. The Open Provenance Model was designed from requirements captured in two "Provenance Challenges", and tested during the third: these challenges were international, multi-disciplinary activities aiming to exchange provenance information between multiple systems and query it. The design of OPM was mostly driven by practical and pragmatic considerations. The purpose of this paper is to formalize the theory underpinning this data model. Specifically, this paper proposes a temporal semantics for OPM graphs, defined in terms of a set of ordering constraints between time-points associated with OPM constructs. OPM inferences are characterized with respect to this temporal semantics, and a novel set of patterns is introduced to establish soundness and completeness properties. Building on this novel foundation, the paper proposes new definitions for graph algebraic operations, graph refinement and the notion of account, by which multiple descriptions of a same execution are allowed to co-exist in a same graph. Overall, this paper provides a strong theoretical underpinning to a data model being adopted by a community of users that help its disambiguation and promote inter-operability.

Flow-Based Provenance

“…In OPM, an edge source represents an effect and an edge represents a cause. Four types of edges can be distinguished depending on type of cause and effect: a used-edge is between a process and an artifact; a generated-by edge is between an artifact and a process; a derived-from edge is between two artifacts; and an informed-by edge is between two processes (Kwasnikowska et al, 2015).…”

“…For a complete description and discussion of the given OPM graph and the sequence of events, the reader is referred to the original source (Kwasnikowska et al, 2015). At this stage of development of using diagrams in the field of provenance, we will utilize this attempt at human understanding of the OPM graph as a base for contrasting it with the FM representation; hence, it is hoped to provide justification for its proposed use as an alternative to OPM graphs.…”

“…If this is not the case then it is possible to depict taking the tray from its stock. The textual description given by Kwasnikowska et al (2015) does not specify this detail. This point is raised because the nature of flow in the FM representation demands specifying the source of the flow of the tray.…”

A Canonical Form for PROV Documents and Its Application to Equality, Signature, and Validation

“…A fundamental operation that must be supported is the ability to merge provenance. While it is understood that validity is not preserved by the merge operation Kwasnikowska et al 2015], it is critical that one can derive a canonical form from the merge of two canonical forms (See Requirement 2.4). To be able to sign a document, there needs to be a unique serialization of its canonical form (Requirement 2.5).…”

An Online Validator for Provenance: Algorithmic Design, Testing, and API

“…Finally, W3C also hosts an RDFa validator 11 . The prov-constraints specification builds upon [9] providing a semantics for OPM [10], a precursor to and subset of prov.…”