Walking into the future with PROV pingback: An application to OPeNDAP using prizms

Abstract

Adding provenance to existing systems can benefit users, but comes at an expense that may be difficult for some to justify. This tradeoff can be overcome by increasing the value of provenance, by decreasing the cost to add it – or by doing both. This paper offers a contribution for each. First, we develop further the W3C PROV pingback technique so that it may reach its potential to interconnect provenance records that would traditionally sit in isolation, thus increasing their value. Second, we reduce the expense to publish the provenance of existing host systems by using minimal coupling to the Prizms Linked Data platform. Using an Earth Sciences scenario and the OPeNDAP data transport architecture as an example host system, we investigate how PROV pingback could work in practice, demonstrate its potential, and identify outstanding issues that must be addressed before it can be widely adopted.