PROV
PROV — Provenance Family
Judgement: Assess
W3C provenance vocabulary; predates OpenLineage by a decade, fading.
Family of W3C documents (PROV-DM data model, PROV-O OWL ontology, PROV-N notation, PROV-XML serialisation) for describing entities, activities, and agents involved in producing a piece of data.
Common in scientific data, archival systems, and FAIR-data contexts. The conceptual model (Entity / Activity / Agent / wasDerivedFrom / wasGeneratedBy) heavily influenced later lineage standards including OpenLineage's job/run/dataset triples.
Why this is listed as niche
RDF-based provenance model pre-dates OpenLineage by nearly a decade and is the canonical reference in research and digital-preservation contexts. Mainstream data engineering tooling has converged on OpenLineage instead — PROV stays the right choice when provenance has to live in a knowledge graph, not in a pipeline observability backend.
At a glance
- Category
- Lineage
- Governance
- W3C
- Status
- W3C Recommendation since 2013
- First released
- 2013
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Lineage.
See PROV in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare PROV against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.