Easy access to provenance: an essential step towards trust on the web

This paper describes the mechanisms involved in accessing provenance on the Web, according to the new W3C PROV specifications, and how end-users can process this information to make basic trust assessments. Additionally, we illustrate this principle by implementing a practical use case, namely Tim Bernerslee's vision of the "Oh, yeah?" button, enabling users to make trust assessments about documents on the web. This implementation leverages the W3C PROV specification to provide user-friendly access to the provenance of Web pages. While the extension described in this paper is specific to one browser, the majority of its components are browser-agnostic.This paper describes the mechanisms involved in accessing provenance on the Web, according to the new W3C PROV specifications, and how end-users can process this information to make basic trust assessments. Additionally, we illustrate this principle by implementing a practical use case, namely Tim Bernerslee's vision of the "Oh, yeah?" button, enabling users to make trust assessments about documents on the web. This implementation leverages the W3C PROV specification to provide user-friendly access to the provenance of Web pages. While the extension described in this paper is specific to one browser, the majority of its components are browser-agnostic.P