Provenance Description of Metadata using PROV with PREMIS for Long-term Use of Metadata

Provenance description is necessary for long-term preservation of digital resources. Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS), which are well-known standards designed for digital preservation, define descriptive elements for digital preservation. Metadata has to be preserved as well as primary resource in order to keep the primary resources alive. However, due to the changing technology and information context, not only primary digital resources but also metadata are at risk of damage or even loss. Thus, metadata preservation is important as well as preservation of primary digital resources. Metadata preservation is a rather new research topic but critical for keeping metadata about preserved resources consistently over time. This paper focuses on provenance as an important issue in digital preservation. It discusses provenance description based on two major metadata standards—PROV and PREMIS. The goal of this study is to clarify a model for describing provenance for metadata preservation. This paper first describes some well-known standards—OAIS, PREMIS, PROV, and so forth, and then discusses a novel model of provenance description based on the PROV Ontology (PROV-O) and PREMIS OWL Ontology. The paper gives provenance description examples using PROV-O and PREMIS OWL Ontology respectively. Based on analysis and mapping among the basic classes of the PROV-O and PREMIS OWL Ontology, we propose an integrated, merged model. We discuss metadata schema provenance and some other open issues.