ProvenanceJS: Revealing the Provenance of Web Pages

Web pages are regularly constructed through combining content from multiple providers (e.g. photos from Flickr, quotes from the New York Times). As a result, it is often difficult for users and programmers to retrieve the provenance of a web page. Here, we present a JavaScript library, ProvenanceJS, that allows for the retrieval and visualization of the provenance information within a Web page and its embedded content. A key contribution is to demonstrate that provenance can be supported using widely deployed browser-based technologies. There has been a rapid proliferation of content sharing on the Web. Sites such as Flickr, Slideshare.net, and YouTube make it easier to find and then integrate images, video, and documents into web pages. Additionally, the cultural of the Web, in particular the blogsphere, thrives on quoting and re-quoting information. Because of this mash-up culture and infrastructure, most web pages consist of content originating from multiple sources. Thus, when viewing a web page it is often difficult to determine where its content came from and how it was produced. This lack of provenance is seen as a critical issue in both the provenance and Web communities as highlighted by the start of the W3C Provenance Incubator Group and its recently produced report on requirements for provenance on the Web [3]. In particular, provenance is one of the most import features users rely on when determining whether to trust a Web page [4]. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee envisioned an “Oh, yeah?” button within Web browsers that when clicked on would produce reasons why the user should trust the web page based on its provenance [1]. To move towards the realization of such an “Oh, yeah?” button that is widely distributed, we have developed a library, ProvenanceJS, that allows for the retrieval and visualization of the provenance of a web page. There are two key contributions stemming from ProvenanceJS: 1. Browser-based technologies are capable of retrieving and rendering provenance information without the need for additional software installation. 2. Embedding provenance information within content is a viable approach for ensuring that the provenance information is available. 1 Source available at: http://code.google.com/p/opmv/source/browse/#svn/