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PAV is a lightweight ontology for tracking Provenance, Authoring and Versioning. PAV specializes the W3C provenance ontology PROV-O in order to describe authorship, curation and digital creation of online resources.
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix pav: <http://purl.org/pav/> .
@prefix : <http://example.com/page2#> .
<http://example.com/page2>
pav:authoredBy :alice ;
pav:curatedBy :bob ;
pav:createdBy :charlie ;
pav:authoredOn "2012-12-24T15:15:15Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
pav:importedOn "2013-03-27T10:06:17Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
pav:importedFrom <http://example.com/data2> .
- PAV Ontology: http://purl.org/pav
- PAV documentation: http://purl.org/pav/html
- PAV paper: doi:10.1186/2041-1480-4-37
- Versions of PAV
- Support: GitHub issues, PAV Google Group
- Blog: Practical Provenance (Examples and further details)
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. In order to support broader interoperability, PAV specializes the general purpose W3C PROV provenance model (PROV-O).
PAV distinguishes between the data related to the digital artifact - named Provenance - and those related to the actual knowledge creation and therefore to the intellectual property aspects – named Authoring. The Versioning axis describes the evolution of digital entities in time.
Using PAV, descriptions can define the Authors that originate or gave existence to the work that is expressed in the digital resource (pav:authoredBy); curators (pav:curatedBy) who are content specialists responsible for shaping the expression in an appropriate format, and contributors (super-property pav:contributedBy) that provided some help in conceiving the resource or in the expressed knowledge creation/extraction.
These provenance aspects can be detailed with dates using pav:curatedOn, pav:authoredOn, etc. Further details about the creation activities, such as different authors contributing specific parts of the resource at different dates are out of scope for PAV and should be defined using vocabularies like PROV-O and additional intermediate entities to describe the different states.
For resources based on other resources, PAV allows specification of direct retrieval (pav:retrievedFrom), import through transformations (pav:importedFrom) and sources that were merely consulted (pav:sourceAccessedAt). These aspects can also define the agents responsible using pav:retrievedBy, pav:importedBy and pav:sourceAccessedBy. Version information can be specified using pav:previousVersion and pav:version.
The creation of the digital representation, for instance an RDF graph, can in many cases be different from the authorship of the knowledge, and in PAV this digital creation is specified using pav:createdBy, pav:createdWith and pav:createdOn.
The goal of PAV is to provide a lightweight, straight forward way to give the essential information about authorship, provenance and versioning, and therefore these properties are described directly on the published resource. As such, PAV does not define any classes or restrict domain/ranges, as all properties are applicable to any online resource.
See Versions for details.
PAV 2.3 updates PAV 2.2 with additional versioning properties.
PAV 2 is based on PAV 1.2 but in a new namespace ( http://purl.org/pav/ ). Terms that are backwards-compatible with 1.2 are indicated in the PAV 2.x ontology using owl:equivalentProperty.
The ontology IRI http://purl.org/pav/ always resolve to the latest version of PAV 2. Particular versionIRIs such as http://purl.org/pav/2.3 can be used by clients to force owl:imports of a particular ontology version - note however that all terms are defined directly in the http://purl.org/pav/ namespace, e.g. the term http://purl.org/pav/version
Feel free use the PAV Google Group where you can post a Question or join a Discussion.
To site PAV, please use:
Paolo Ciccarese, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Khalid Belhajjame, Alasdair JG Gray, Carole Goble and Tim Clark: PAV ontology: Provenance, Authoring and Versioning. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2013, 4:37. doi:10.1186/2041-1480-4-37