A Model of Provenance Applied to Biodiversity Datasets

Abstract

Nowadays, the Web has become one of the main sources of biodiversity information. An increasing number of biodiversity research institutions add new specimens and their related information to their biological collections and make this information available on the Web. However, mechanisms which are currently available provide insufficient provenance of biodiversity information. In this paper, we propose a new biodiversity provenance model extending the W3C PROV Data Model. Biodiversity data is mapped to terms from relevant ontologies, such as Dublin Core and GeoSPARQL, stored in triple stores and queried using SPARQL endpoints. Additionally, we provide a use case using our provenance model to enrich collection data.