Provenance

The Provenance App provides support for tracking the provenance of important data points stored and/or processed in other equinox apps.

The nomeclature aims to reflect the W3C PROV data model. In the first instance the implementation is a simplified approach that is adapted to the Django structure with minimal overhead.

Entities

PROV Entities in this implementation are Django model attributes in the supported apps. They can be of any type (numbers, text, media etc.)

Activities

PROV Activities are how Entities (data points) come into existence and how their attributes change to become new entities. This may be by processing previously existing entities. For example, if a second version of a data point was generated by changing the units of the first version, then this change of units is an activity.

Agents

An Agent performs Activity and can be assigned some degree of responsibility for that activity. Agents can be persons, software, organizations etc. anything that can ascribed responsibility.

The implementation stores references to agents (names, url’s etc.). The provenance of Equinox Entities is documented by creating a relation (ForeignKey) to the Agent model. This approach effectivel ymodels the PROV WasAttributedTo relation.

Provenance Views

Provenance Management Commands

• TODO