Provenance in the next-generation spatial knowledge infrastructure

Abstract

In quality evaluation of the piece of art its provenance (e.g.ownership over time) is often more important than the item itself.Considering that spatial data is rarely used and shared in its raw form, knowing its history (i.e.computation, transformation and other processes) may be decisive in evaluating the quality of spatial data (Buneman and Davidson, 2010).There are two concepts referring to the history of (spatial) resources on the web: lineage (defined by the International Organization for Standardization -ISO) and provenance (defined by the World Wide Web Consortium -W3C).In geospatial domain, these two concepts are widely understood and used as synonyms.Lineage of a spatial resource (dataset or a service) is the standard term used in the spatial information domain, which is used to describe the history of a dataset and, in as much as is known, recount the life cycle of a dataset from collection and acquisition through processing, compilation and derivation to its current form (SA, 2015).Lineage metadata is only optional in the ISO-compliant standard metadata set, however, this element often appears in often sparsely populated spatial resources' metadata and, along with other metadata elements, serves as a potent vehicle for deciding on spatial resources' fitness for use.However, even in if lineage information might be present in its most exhaustive form, its main drawback for widespread automated use, is its standard data structure: more or less structured collection of the free-form text descriptions, a format unsuitable for the use in a geospatial (semantic) web.Provenance is the standard term used in the context of the web and it is defined within a standard known as PROV as information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or a thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness (W3C, 2013a).PROV defines highly structured conceptual model for provenance encoding, enabling its interchange between systems and automated use on the web (W3C, 2013b).With the aim of enabling spatial data on the web, there have been several attempts to align the standards for lineage and provenance, and these efforts demonstrate a strong convergence towards extending the current W3C provenance standard for geospatial resources.Enabling geospatial web services with provenance is paramount for reusability of spatial resources (data, information and services).In this context, there are two perspectives on provenance modelling:  Modeling provenance of spatial resources for their discoverability and automated evaluation of spatial resources fitness for use, and  Modeling provenance capture for automated data production and/or update.In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art in using provenance and lineage in the spatial domain.We also demonstrate the importance and applicability of both perspectives with a use-case in which, at this point in time, we provide a partially complete solution, and look at what should be possible in current and next generation spatial knowledge infrastructure.

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