We present the Provenance, Authoring and Versioning ontology (PAV): a lightweight ontology for capturing “just enough” descriptions essential for tracking the provenance, authoring and versioning of web resources. We argue that such descriptions are essential for digital scientific content. PAV distinguishes between contributors, authors and curators of content and creators of representations in addition to the provenance of originating resources that have been accessed, transformed and consumed. We explore five projects (and communities) that have adopted PAV illustrating their usage through concrete examples. Moreover, we present mappings that show how PAV extends the W3C PROV-O ontology to support broader interoperability.

Paolo Ciccarese, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Khalid Belhajjame, Alasdair J G Gray, Carole Goble, Tim Clark

Full publication: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2013, 4:37