ELIS –Multimedia Lab

Tom De Nies, Robert Meusel, Kai Eckert, Dominique Ritze,

Anastasia Dimou, Laurens De Vocht, Ruben Verborgh, Erik Mannens and Rik Van de Walle

Ghent University – iMinds – MMLab

http://users.ugent.be/~tdenies

@TomDeNies

Research Group Data and Web Science

University of Mannheim, Germany

DEMO: A Lightweight Provenance Pingback and Query Service for Web Publications

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

Publications benefit highly from provenance…

…but how do we link to it?

The Problem

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

Currently, according to PROV-AQ

PublisherPROV

+

PROV

Author

User

prov:has_provenance

Publisher maintains 2 URIs:1. Resource URI2. Provenance URI… and the provenance itself(could also be hosted somewhere else)

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

In essence, nothing. It’s intuitive and straightforward.

However:

All/most responsibility lies with the publisher of the resource

This publisher has little to no incentive to host & maintain the provenance

No possibility for 3rd party provenance or curation

How can we add new provenance?

What’s wrong with that?

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

A lightweight Web service

that allows linking to and retrieval of provenance information

of any published resource on the Web.

Our proposal

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

What does that look like?

Publisher maintains 3 URIs:1. Resource URI2. Provenance pingback URI3. Provenance query service URIAuthor or PROV-Pings hosts the provenance

Still PROV-AQ compliant!

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

Publishers can focus on what they do best, not on provenance hosting or maintenance.

Provenance can be added by anyone involved in the creation or usage of the resource.

Other resources with shared provenance are easily discovered through queries

→ especially useful in academics for related work (a.o.)

What are the benefits of this?

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

What else is needed? Future Work

Provenance Discovery what if the publisher refuses? single, global provenance service? p2p provenance services? registry/search engine for provenance services?

Provenance Curation maintaining quality?

provenance of submitted provenance?

claiming authorship? (cfr. Google Scholar)

up/down voting?

Provenance Creation often the bottleneck

capturing tools exist

as well as version control mappings(git2prov, hg2prov*, svn2prov*, … )

*thanks @timrdf!

ELIS –Multimedia Lab

Questions?

…or come talk to me later!

Try it (very much at your own risk…and ours):http://git2prov.org:8902/prov-pings/

(soon at port 80 as mentioned in the paper)