Recording authorship, curation and digital creation with the PAV ontology

We *) are pleased to announce the release of the PAV (Provenance,
Authoring and Versioning) ontology v2.1.

  http://purl.org/pav/2.1

PAV 2.1 includes subproperty mapping to the W3C provenance ontology
PROV-O [2], thus enabling interoperability between PAV and
PROV-compliant tools.


PAV supplies terms for distinguishing between the different roles of
the agents contributing content in current web based systems:
*contributors*, *authors*, *curators* and digital artifact *creators*.
The ontology also provides terms for tracking provenance of digital
entities that are published on the web and then accessed, transformed
and consumed.


This lightweight ontology is best explained with a simple example:

@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix pav: <http://purl.org/pav/> .
@prefix : <http://example.com/blog#> .

<http://example.com/blog.html>
   pav:createdBy :alice ;
   pav:createdWith :wordpress ;

   pav:importedFrom <http://example.com/data.csv> ;
   pav:importedBy :csv2html ;

   pav:authoredBy :bob ;
   pav:curatedBy :charlie ;

   pav:authoredOn "2012-12-24T15:15:15Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
   pav:importedOn "2013-03-27T10:06:17Z"^^xsd:dateTime .


This example shows how a blog post was made using Wordpress by Alice,
the content of which was imported from a CSV file, and authored by
Bob, then curated (shaped and verified) by Charlie. The import was in
2013, but the content was authored in 2012.


The PAV ontology [1] is presented in a blog post [2] and HTML
documentation [3].  Version history and more details are available in
the PAV wiki [8].


A SKOS mapping from PAV to DC Terms [4] is also available,
highlighting the differences and similarities between the two
vocabularies.

PAV can be used in OWL by importing the namespace http://purl.org/pav
directly, which resolves to a light ontology with 16 object properties
and 11 data properties. To increase interoperability, PAV does not
explicitly impose any classes or domain/ranges, as all properties are
used directly on the described resource.


PAV is successfully used for purposes such as hypothesis knowledge
bases [5], nanopublications [6] and VoID datasets [7], and we believe
PAV is a good complement to the general PROV-O model, as it allows
describing the "essential provenance" for web resources in a
straight-forward way, meanwhile keeping precise distinctions between
concepts such as authoring/creating and importing/retrieving. In our
blog post [2] we also show how PAV can be use concurrently with other
PROV extensions, and how PROV tools can be used for interoperability
such as visualization.


*) This announcement is sent on behalf of Paolo Ciccarese, Stian
Soiland-Reyes, Khalid Belhajjame and Alasdair Gray.


[1] http://purl.org/pav/2.1
[2] http://practicalprovenance.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/pav/
[3] http://purl.org/pav/html
[4] http://purl.org/pav/mapping/skos
[5] http://hypothesis.alzforum.org/swan/do!getHome.action
[6] http://nanopub.org/wordpress/?page_id=40
[7] http://www.openphacts.org/specs/datadesc/
[8] https://code.google.com/p/pav-ontology/wiki/Homepage


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2013 16:51:07 UTC