---
slug: what-is-prov
title: What Is W3C PROV
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-prov
---

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# What Is W3C PROV

## §SELF — what-is-prov

**What this page is:** A definition of the W3C PROV standard for representing provenance information.
**What it explains:** The core types and relations that PROV defines, and how they model the origin and history of things.
**Why read it:** You will understand what provenance means in a formal sense, how PROV structures it, and why OIP receipts can be exported as PROV-O for interoperability.

### What W3C PROV Is

PROV (short for PROVenance) is a W3C recommendation published in 2013 for representing provenance information on the web. Provenance means: where something came from, who made it, what was used to make it, and how it changed over time. PROV provides a standardized way to encode this information so that different systems can exchange and query it.

### Why It Matters

Without a standard for provenance, every system invents its own way to record origin and history. Data from one system cannot be understood by another. PROV solves this by defining a common vocabulary: any system that exports PROV can be queried, visualized, and audited by any PROV-compatible tool. This matters for scientific reproducibility, legal compliance, and data quality assurance.

### The Key Idea

PROV defines three core types that everything else is built from:

1. **Entity** — a thing: a document, a data file, an image, a physical object. An entity is a "thing one wants to describe the provenance of."
2. **Activity** — a process that creates or transforms entities. Activities have a start time and an end time.
3. **Agent** — a person, organization, or software system responsible for an activity. Agents bear some form of responsibility.

These three types are connected by relations:

- **wasGeneratedBy** — an entity was generated by an activity.
- **wasDerivedFrom** — one entity was derived from another entity.
- **wasAssociatedWith** — an activity was associated with an agent.
- **actedOnBehalfOf** — one agent acted on behalf of another agent.

For example: A scientist (Agent) runs an experiment (Activity) that produces a dataset (Entity, via wasGeneratedBy). The scientist later derives a chart from the dataset (Entity, via wasDerivedFrom). A lab supervisor (Agent) authorized the experiment (actedOnBehalfOf).

### What It Got Right

- **Simple core with expressive extensions.** The three types and four relations cover most provenance scenarios. More complex cases use PROV extensions.
- **Multiple serializations.** PROV can be expressed as RDF (PROV-O, the OWL ontology), XML (PROV-XML), or a JSON-based format (PROV-JSON). Different tools can use the format they prefer.
- **Time-aware.** Activities have start and end times. Entities have generation times. This enables temporal reasoning and querying.
- **Widely adopted.** Used in scientific workflow systems, digital preservation, data journalism, and regulatory compliance.

### What It Got Wrong or Left Unfinished

- **No enforcement mechanism.** PROV describes what happened; it does not cryptographically prove it. A malicious agent can record false provenance. PROV must be paired with external verification mechanisms.
- **No canonical identity for entities.** Two systems may describe the same real-world entity with different identifiers, and PROV provides no built-in way to resolve this.
- **Complexity in practice.** While the core is simple, real-world provenance graphs grow large and complex quickly. Querying and visualizing large PROV graphs is computationally expensive.
- **Ambiguity in agent responsibility.** The distinction between "associated with" and "responsible for" is not always clear, leading to inconsistent usage across systems.

### How It Connects to Other Ideas

**Semantic Web and OWL.** PROV-O is an OWL ontology, which means it can be reasoned over with standard semantic web tools. Provenance queries can use SPARQL, the standard query language for RDF.

**Digital signatures and verifiable credentials.** PROV records what happened; digital signatures prove who said it happened. Combining PROV with cryptographic signatures produces verifiable provenance — a record whose origin can be authenticated.

**OIP receipt export.** An OIP invocation maps directly to PROV: the invocation is an Activity, the caller is an Agent, the output is an Entity, and a replay is a Derivation. Repair operations map to PROV's Revision relation. Exporting OIP receipts as PROV-O makes them interoperable with provenance tools, academic workflows, and legal audit systems without requiring custom parsers.

### Sources

- W3C. (2013). "PROV Model Primer." W3C Working Group Note. https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/
- W3C. (2013). "PROV-O: The PROV Ontology." W3C Recommendation. https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/
- Lebo, T., Sahoo, S., McGuinness, D., et al. (2013). "PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model." W3C Recommendation. https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-dm/

---

## Up the tree

- [OIP root](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip) — protocol root, zero-context entry
- [Thinker Reference hub](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-thinker-reference) — full hierarchy map
- [Protocol Concepts shelf](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-protocol-concepts) — siblings on this shelf
- [Voxel graph article](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-voxel-graph) — how pages link as voxels
- [Self-describing protocol](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-self-describing-protocol)

## Related on this shelf

- [What Is Autopoiesis](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-autopoiesis)
- [What Is Capability-Based Security](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-capability-security)
- [What Is a Capability Token](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-capability-token)
- [What Is a Confused Deputy](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-confused-deputy)
- [What Is Context as Cursor](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-context-as-cursor)
- [What Is a Convergence Catalogue](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-convergence-catalogue)
- [What Is a Falsification Surface](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-falsification-surface)
- [What Is HATEOAS](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-hateoas)

## Machine surfaces

- Public page: `https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-prov`
- JSON article: `https://miscsubjects.com/api/articles/what-is-prov`
- OIP ask: `https://miscsubjects.com/api/dispatch?ask=What%20Is%20W3C%20PROV`


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## Where OIP does this differently (required edge)

OIP difference: every invocation carries provenance actor/fingerprint; philosophy pages must cite checkable sources the same way.

