Earth Science Provenance Ontology (PROV-ES)

Notes from session

- Goal of provenance based work of any kind is transparency of work / derivations that led to research product

                - "Cake is baked, but we don't know the recipe"

Overview of PROV

- Documentation can be found: http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview/

- Standard (first order) terms: Activity, Agent(s)(human and software based)

- Predicates: wasAssociatedWith; startedAtTime,

- Expanded terms : Agent : person, organization, softwareAgent;  Entity: collection, plan, bundle

PROV ES

Started as WG in 2013

Goals are: - better understand lineage and dependencies of ESDRs

- Provide an interoperable representation of prove for NASA EOS missions that adhere to the NASA Preservation Information Architecture

- Want to look broader than simply ESIP prospective

Motivation: One of the things T. Berners-Lee originally envisioned was a way to use provenance of web resources to understand and establish trust. PROV-ES wants to narrow scope and envision a way to use PROV for ES specific products (software, data, visualizations, publications, etch.)

Use cases: creating a dataset, using a data set, data set re-gridding across different instruments, Sea-level rise,

USE case exercises and mapping: [URL to google doc coming from Hook ?]

Preservation and Stewardship wiki (Will be updated soon) : http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Provenance_and_Context_Content_Standard

Two approaches to extending PROV

Via Subclassing

• take baseline classes and subclass them in an ontological way
• leverage extended cocnepts for earth sicence dat systems
• retain ontological concepts
• could leverage rules / classifications to assert extended classes

Via Attributes

• does not retain hierarchy
• can reuse existing w3c prov tools …
• could leverage rules  / classifications to assert attributes to extended classes

- The two approaches aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

- An attribute approach though requires querying and searching.

- With sublcassing open world assumptions are preserved, and therefore inference is possible. 

- Question for discussion : Which approach is right for the ES community?

- Currently, PROV operates as top-level ontology, with many very specific project level applications at project level. PROV – ES  should is aiming slightly higher than application level for ES community.