Enabling Provenance on the Web: Standardization and Research Questions

Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities, involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing in the world. Some 10 years after beginning research on the topic of provenance, I co-chaired the provenance working group at the World Wide Web Consortium. The working group published the PROV standard for provenance in 2013. In this talk, I will present some use cases for provenance, the PROV standard and some flagship examples of adoption. I will then move on to our current research area aiming to exploit provenance, in the context of the Sociam, SmartSociety, ORCHID projects. Doing so, I will present techniques to deal with large scale provenance, to build predictive models based on provenance, and to analyse provenance.