A Use Case-Guided Comparison of OPM and PML

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Provenance Incubator Group has the goal of providing “a state-of-the art understanding ... in the area of provenance for Semantic Web technologies.” To enhance the mutual understanding of language capabilities, the group is attempting to map several of the existing provenance languages such as Provenir, PREMIS, and the Proof Markup Language (PML) into the provenance language the Open Provenance Model (OPM). OPM is intended to be a precise inter-lingua for exchanging provenance information. This article contributes to the understanding of the capabilities of OPM and PML by establishing a set of six common and relatively simple provenance use cases and comparing the OPM and PML models and implications of those models. A provenance use case consists of a scenario and a provenance question associated with the scenario. Some of the use cases are taken from the OPM specification document. The use cases in this article may be considered essential for any provenance encoding intended to be used for provenance interoperability. The modeling of the use cases exposes a number of substantial difficulties in creating and interpreting OPM specifications for use by machine reasoning systems.