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6 Applying W3C PROV to geospatial information
The OWS-9 Cross Community Interoperability “Conflation with Provenance” OGC 12- 159 https:portal.opengeospatial.orgfiles?artifact_id=51818, describes previous
efforts done for using the ISO19115 Metadata standard to encode provenance on a conflation processes. The work on provenance in OWS-10 started out by reviewing that
work and extending it to include attribute level provenance and a more compact notation. Then W3C PROV XML was considered. Finally, W3C PROV RDF was chosen for
representing provenance of conflation process. More details on these decisions are provided in Section 11.
To give the reader the most relevant information first we decided to present the work in the reverse order: the following section describes W3C PROV in RDF and then in XML.
Later, Section 10 describes the efforts done for the ISO model and Section 11 briefly compares both approaches.
6.1 Mapping Geospatial concepts and W3C PROV
W3C PROV is a general model, and we extent it to map it to geospatial information. One of the first things that we have to do to use W3C PROV in the geospatial domain and
in the OGC in particular is to map OGC concepts to PROV. U A feature instance is an entity.
U A feature type is a subclass of entity. U Datasets some of them called sources in ISO lineage are collections of entities.
U A WPS execution process step is an activity. U A WPS execution parameter is an entity.
U An operation WPS operation is a plan. U A processing service is a collection of plans.
U The definition of a parameter in a WPS execution is expressed as a role of an entity in an activity.
U The WPS standard is a subclass of a plan collection. U The responsible party involved in the creation of plans and entities is an agent.
U The role or contribution of a responsible party to the conflation process is expressed as the role of an agent in an activity or in a plan.
Copyright © 2014 Open Geospatial Consortium.
15 Geospatial information is structured in different levels of granularity as explained in
Section 5.5. When mapping the W3C PROV concepts to the geospatial domain we have adopted the feature level as the “basic” level, i.e. features are entities in PROV. A dataset
