Constraints of the PROV Data Model

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. PROV-DM is the conceptual data model that forms a basis for the W3C provenance (PROV) family of specifications. This document defines a subset of PROV instances called valid PROV instances, by analogy with notions of validity for other Web standards. The intent of validation is to ensure that a PROV instance represents a consistent history of objects and their interactions that is safe to use for the purpose of logical reasoning and other kinds of analysis. Valid PROV instances satisfy certain definitions, inferences, and constraints. These definitions, inferences, and constraints provide a measure of consistency checking for provenance and reasoning over provenance. They can also be used to normalize PROV instances to forms that can easily be compared in order to determine whether two PROV instances are equivalent. Validity and equivalence are also defined for PROV bundles (that is, named instances) and documents (that is, a toplevel instance together with zero or more bundles).