An Online Validator for Provenance: Algorithmic Design, Testing, and API

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. The W3C Provenance Working group has just published the prov family of specifications, which include a data model for provenance on the Web. The working group introduces a notion of valid prov document whose intent is to ensure that a prov document represents a consistent history of objects and their interactions that is safe to use for the purpose of reasoning and other kinds of analysis. Valid prov documents satisfy certain definitions, inferences, and constraints, specified in prov-constraints. This paper discusses the design of ProvValidator, an online service for validating provenance documents according to prov-constraints. It discusses the algorithmic design of the validator, the complexity of the algorithm, how we demonstrated compliance with the standard, and its rest api.