The World Wide Web is now deeply intertwined with our lives, and has become a catalyst for a data deluge, making vast amounts of data available online, at a click of a button. With Web 2.0, users are no longer passive consumers, but active publishers and curators of data. Hence, from science to food manufacturing, from data journalism to personal well-being, from social media to art, there is a strong interest in provenance, a description of what influenced an artifact, a data set, a document, a blog, or any resource on the Web and beyond. Provenance is a crucial piece of information that can help a consumer make a judgment as to whether something can be trusted. Provenance is no longer seen as a curiosity in art circles, but it is regarded as pragmatically, ethically, and methodologically crucial for our day-to-day data manipulation and curation activities on the Web.

Luc Moreau, Paul Groth

Full publication: Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology, September 2013, Pages 1–129