PROV-O: following the evidence

Status: working Museum application profile; the cited standard remains authoritative

The question

Where did this statement, file, or image come from?

A museum record is assembled over time. An artist or platform publishes metadata. A blockchain records a transaction. A Museum process retrieves a response at a particular block. A browser renders the work. A curator writes an interpretation. A reviewer approves a correction.

PROV-O gives those relationships a shared vocabulary. It lets a visitor, researcher, or machine follow a claim to the activity that produced it, the sources used, and the people or systems involved.

In the Casey Reas accession

The public record for CENTURY #31 includes a title, token identifier, custody observation, metadata digest, technical assessment, and curatorial account. These statements come from different sources and methods.

A provenance map can show that the retained metadata entity was generated by a retrieval activity; the activity used an Art Blocks endpoint and was associated with a Museum verifier; a technical observation used the metadata, chain evidence, generator route, and browser environment; and the published record was derived from reviewed Museum records at a named commit.

The map makes that path inspectable. Its usefulness still depends on the quality and authority of the cited evidence.

What PROV-O contributes

PROV-O begins with three classes:

Direct relations answer common questions:

• prov:used: what an Activity used;
• prov:generated / prov:wasGeneratedBy: what an Activity produced;
• prov:wasDerivedFrom: the source Entity from which another Entity was derived;
• prov:wasAttributedTo: the Agent to whom an Entity is attributed;
• prov:wasAssociatedWith: the Agent associated with an Activity;
• prov:actedOnBehalfOf: an Agent's documented delegation;
• prov:wasInformedBy: one Activity's relationship to another;
• prov:hadPrimarySource, prov:wasQuotedFrom, and prov:wasRevisionOf: specific documentary lineage;
• prov:hadMember: membership in a collection Entity.

Qualified relations add a role, time, or other context to a relation. The Museum uses them when a simple edge would lose material meaning. For example, when the same file serves as token input in one activity and comparison evidence in another.

Museum application profile

Provenance belongs to assertions as well as objects

Museum statements are Entities with their own provenance. A curatorial interpretation can cite its sources and author without being recast as an objective property of the artwork. A technical result can identify its tool, version, inputs, and observation time. A correction can use prov:wasRevisionOf while the repository's supersedes relation preserves the Museum record history.

Bundles and releases

A prov:Bundle is an Entity that contains a provenance description and can itself have provenance. The Museum will use a Bundle for a release-bounded accession graph. Its source commit, release-manifest commitment, generation tool, reviewer, and publication time can then be described without confusing the graph with the events it documents.

Chain observations

The token, transaction, block, raw RPC response, parsed log, custody observation, and Museum conclusion remain separate Entities. The retrieval and verification steps are Activities. Block number, block hash, chain ID, finality/canonicality result, endpoint, request parameters, and observation time belong to the evidence boundary.

Interpretation and uncertainty

PROV-O records lineage; the Museum profile records the status and strength of a claim. Evidence classes, confidence, uncertainty, public/restricted status, and review disposition use Museum terms with stable definitions. prov:Role states how an Entity or Agent participated in an Activity and is not used as an evidence grade.

What this standard leaves to the Museum

PROV-O expresses assertions about provenance. It does not verify that an assertion is true, that a source is authoritative, that attribution means legal authorship, that association creates legal agency, or that a transfer conveys title. Trust is evaluated through the source, institutional authority, signatures or commitments, validation, and domain review surrounding the graph.

Absence from a graph means only that the relation was not asserted in that graph. It does not establish that the event never occurred.

For machines and implementers

Authority and version

• Authority: World Wide Web Consortium.
• Status: W3C Recommendation, 30 April 2013.
• Specification: PROV-O.
• Namespace: http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#.
• Constraints: PROV-CONSTRAINTS.
• Provenance access and trust context: PROV-AQ.

The 2013 Recommendation remains the current PROV-O publication in the W3C publication history as observed on 2026-08-05.

W3C specification text is governed by the W3C Document License. Museum profile text and extensions are separately authored and must not be presented as a modified W3C Recommendation.

Serialization target

The Museum's canonical provenance dataset uses RDF 1.1 TriG. A named graph that contains provenance descriptions may be explicitly typed as prov:Bundle; the TriG graph label alone does not make it a PROV Bundle. Turtle is supplied for focused examples and review; JSON-LD is supplied for APIs. A serialization records:

Museum provenance-profile version
PROV-O Recommendation date
Museum extension namespace and version
source release commit and manifest commitment
generator name and version
generation time
dataset digest
SHACL and PROV-constraint validation results

Minimal evidence path

@prefix prov: <http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#> .
@prefix museum: <https://6529.io/museum/network/ns/> .

museum:metadata-response-01 a prov:Entity ;
  prov:wasGeneratedBy museum:metadata-retrieval-01 .

museum:metadata-retrieval-01 a prov:Activity ;
  prov:used museum:art-blocks-endpoint-01 ;
  prov:wasAssociatedWith museum:verification-agent-01 ;
  prov:generated museum:metadata-response-01 .

museum:published-object-record-01 a prov:Entity ;
  prov:wasDerivedFrom museum:metadata-response-01,
    museum:chain-evidence-01,
    museum:reviewed-accession-record-01 ;
  prov:wasGeneratedBy museum:publication-build-01 .

The production graph qualifies uses and associations with roles and times. The simple relations remain available for interoperable query.

Local terms

The Museum extension supplies concepts that PROV-O intentionally leaves to the domain, including accession state, title binding, custody observation, external chain identity, evidence class, claim status, preservation status, documentation surrogate, and generator-capture status. Each term has a stable URI, definition, expected class, evidence requirement, and version history.

Validation

A release passes RDF parsing, closed SHACL shapes, stable-URI and namespace checks, controlled Activity and role vocabularies, required source/evidence links, temporal checks derived from PROV-CONSTRAINTS, public/restricted separation, and golden graph tests. Validation demonstrates structural and logical consistency within the declared profile. Source truth remains a curatorial, technical, and institutional responsibility.

The Museum never uses the nonexistent property prov:wasUsedBy; the valid directions are Activity prov:used Entity and Entity prov:wasGeneratedBy Activity, among the relations defined by PROV-O.

The Casey Reas accession

Museum state: source_fields_present. The Casey accession identifies Entities, Activities, Agents, times, sources, revisions, and evidence classes sufficient for a rich PROV-O projection. The repository has not yet published a release-bounded TriG Bundle, SHACL report, or PROV constraints report. Current JSON source records must therefore be described as provenance-rich Museum records, rather than a validated PROV-O release.

Official sources

• W3C, PROV-O Recommendation.
• W3C, dated PROV-O Recommendation.
• W3C, PROV-O publication history.
• W3C, PROV namespace.
• W3C, PROV-CONSTRAINTS.
• W3C, PROV-AQ.
• W3C, Document License.