Tim Clark

Paolo Ciccarese, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Tim Clark

Scholars have made handwritten notes and comments in books and manuscripts for centuries. Today's blogs and news sites typically invite users to express their opinions on the published content; URLs allow web resources to be shared with accompanying annotations and comments using third-party services like Twitter or Facebook. These contributions have until recently been constrained within specific services, making them second-class citizens of the Web. Web Annotations are now emerging as fully independent Linked Data in their own right, no longer restricted to plain textual comments in application silos. Annotations can now range from bookmarks and comments, to fine-grained annotations of a selection of, for example, a section of a frame within a video stream. Technologies and standards now exist to create, publish, syndicate, mash-up and consume, finely targeted, semantically rich digital annotations on practically any content, as first-class Web citizens. This development is being driven by the need for collaboration and annotation reuse amongst domain researchers, computer scientists, scientific publishers, and scholarly content databases.

Paolo Ciccarese, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Khalid Belhajjame et al.

Provenance is a critical ingredient for establishing trust of published scientific content. This is true whether we are considering a data set, a computational workflow, a peer-reviewed publication or a simple scientific claim with supportive evidence. Existing vocabularies such as DC Terms and the W3C PROV-O are domain-independent and general-purpose and they allow and encourage for extensions to cover more specific needs. We identify the specific need for identifying or distinguishing between the various roles assumed by agents manipulating digital artifacts, such as author, contributor and curator. We present the Provenance, Authoring and Versioning ontology (PAV): a lightweight ontology for capturing just enough descriptions essential for tracking the provenance, authoring and versioning of web resources. We argue that such descriptions are essential for digital scientific content. PAV distinguishes between contributors, authors and curators of content and creators of representations in addition to the provenance of originating resources that have been accessed, transformed and consumed. We explore five projects (and communities) that have adopted PAV illustrating their usage through concrete examples. Moreover, we present mappings that show how PAV extends the PROV-O ontology to support broader interoperability. The authors strived to keep PAV lightweight and compact by including only those terms that have demonstrated to be pragmatically useful in existing applications, and by recommending terms from existing ontologies when plausible. We analyze and compare PAV with related approaches, namely Provenance Vocabulary, DC Terms and BIBFRAME. We identify similarities and analyze their differences with PAV, outlining strengths and weaknesses of our proposed model. We specify SKOS mappings that align PAV with DC Terms.