A Foundational Ontology to Support Scientific Experiments

Provenance is a term used to describe the history, lineage or origins of a piece of data. In scientific experiments that are computationally intensive the data resources are produced in large-scale. Thus, as more scientific data are produced the importance of tracking and sharing its metadata grows. Therefore, it is desirable to make it easy to access, share, reuse, integrate and reason. To address these requirements ontologies can be of use to encode expectations and agreements concerning provenance metadata reuse and integration. In this paper, we present a well-founded provenance ontology named Open proVenance Ontology (OvO) which takes inspiration on three theories: the lifecycle of in silico scientific experiments, the Open Provenance Model (OPM) and the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). OvO may act as a reference conceptual model that can be used by researchers to explore the semantics of provenance metadata.

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