Prov4J: A Semantic Web Framework for Generic Provenance Management

Provenance is a cornerstone element in the process of enabling quality assessment for the Web of Data. Applications consuming or generating Linked Data will need to become provenance-aware, i.e., being able to capture and consume provenance information associated with the data. This will bring provenance as a key requirement for a wide spectrum of applications. This work describes Prov4J, a framework which uses Semantic Web tools and standards to address the core challenges in the construction of a generic provenance management system. The work discusses key software engineering aspects for provenance capture and consumption and analyzes the suitability of the framework under the deployment of a real-world scenario.