Sensor Data Provenance: SSNO and PROV-O Together At Last

This paper presents an alignment between the W3C Provenance Working Group’s recommended ontology (PROV-O) and the W3C Semantic Sensor Networks Incubator Group’s ontology (SSNO). The alignment views PROV-O as an upper ontology which is extended with SSNO concepts and properties. This allows representation of observation details and sensor deployments that are not possible in the SSNO alone, and gives a basis for alignment with Open Geospatial Consortium Observations & Measurements aligned ontologies. Further to the alignment, rules are presented that further constrain the interpretation of the aligned ontologies and provide a mechanism by which provenance information can be generated from SSN data thereby allowing modellers to take advantage of the new features. The benefit of the aligned ontologies is illustrated with an example of cross-domain provenance querying enabled by the alignment.