Pattern:Provenance Pattern

From City Data Model Project Collaboratory
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Description

An English description of the definition (what distinguishes this sense of the term?).

The concept of provenance is important for many applications in the smart city domain. It is often important to represent the origin of a particular record, document, or other object. To do this in a consistent way requires a mechanism to represent the provenance of objects. The ontology for representing provenance shall conform to the ontology specified in the W3C Recommendation “PROV-O: The PROV Ontology”.

Key Concepts and Classes

The core classes of Agent and Activity in PROV-O are extended with specialized classes that are related to the Agent and Activity patterns defined in this standard. — Entity: An Entity is a generic concept that may represent a physical, digital, or abstract kind of thing. For example, a data record or a physical piece of equipment may both be considered Entities. An Entity has the following core properties: wasDerivedFrom: the wasDerivedFrom property indicates that the Entity was derived from some other Entity. This may occur in cases of revisions (e.g. of documents), or in cases where one entity is used in the creation of another. For example, the results of some predictive model may be derived from some dataset). wasAttributedTo: the wasAttributedTo property identifies the Agent(s) that is in some way responsible for the creation of the Entity. wasGeneratedBy: the wasGeneratedBy property identifies the Activity(s) that produced or otherwise resulted in the existence of the Entity. — Activity: An Activity is something that acts on Entities (such as consuming or transforming them). An Activity has the following core properties: used: the used property identifies an Entity(s) that was used by a particular Activity. For example, if some set of data was generated by the activity of running a predictive simulation model, then the input dataset(s) would be identified as used by the simulation model prediction activity. wasAssociatedWith: the wasAssociatedWith property identifies an Agent(s) that is in some way responsible for the activity taking place. — Agent: An Agent is a generic concept that may represent a person, software system, organization, or any other object that may be responsible for the occurrence of an activity.

Has Class(es)

Agent, Activity, Entity


Status

Pending Approval


Supplementary Figures

Figure Caption