A New Perspective on Semantics of Data Provenance

Data Provenance refers to the “origin”, “lineage”, and “source” of data. In this work, we examine provenance from a semantics perspective and present the W7 model, an ontological model of data provenance. In the W7 model, provenance is conceptualized as a combination of seven interconnected elements including “what”, “when”, “where”, “how”, “who”, “which” and “why”. Each of these components may be used to track events that affect data during its lifetime. The W7 model is general and extensible enough to capture provenance semantics for data in different domains. Using the example of the Wikipedia, we illustrate how the W7 model can capture domain or application specific provenance.