Linking Across Provenance Bundles

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. Bundles, defined in [PROV-DM] as sets of provenance descriptions, were introduced in PROV as the mechanism by which provenance of provenance can be expressed. Bundles, whose validity is established independently of each other [PROV-CONSTRAINTS], are essentially independent of each other, acting as islands of provenance descriptions. In applications where provenance is created by multiple parties over time, it is useful for provenance descriptions created by one party to link to provenance descriptions created by another party. Such a mechanism would allow the "stitching" of provenance descriptions together. Given that provenance descriptions are expected to be contained in bundles, this would require a capability to link entity descriptions across bundles. To address this requirement, this document introduces a relation Mention allowing an entity description to be linked to another entity description occurring in another bundle.} author = {Luc Moreau and Timothy Lebo