Modeling Information Diffusion in Social Media as Provenance with W3C PROV

In recent years, research in information diffusion in social media has attracted a lot of attention, since the produced data is fast, massive and viral. Additionally, the provenance of such data is equally important because it helps to judge the relevance and trustworthiness of the information enclosed in the data. However, social media currently provide insufficient mechanisms for provenance, while models of information diffusion use their own concepts and notations, targeted to specific use cases. In this paper, we propose a model for information diffusion and provenance, based on the W3C PROV Data Model. The advantage is that PROV is a Web-native and interoperable format that allows easy publication of provenance data, and minimizes the integration effort among different systems making use of PROV.