A Lightweight Provenance Pingback and Query Service for Web Publications

Web resources, such as publications, datasets, pictures and others can be directly linked to their provenance data, as described in the specification about Provenance Access and Query (PROV-AQ) by the W3C. On its own, this approach places all responsibility with the publisher of the resource, who hopefully maintains and publishes provenance information. In reality, however, most publishers lack incentives to publish the provenance of resources, even if the owner would like such information to be published. Currently, it is very intricate to link existing resources to new provenance information, either provided by the owner or a third party. In this paper, we present a solution for this problem by implementing a lightweight, read/write provenance query service, integrated with a pingback mechanism, following the PROV-AQ recommendation