Encoding Provenance Metadata for Social Science Datasets

Recording provenance is a key requirement for data-centric scholarship, allowing researchers to evaluate the integrity of source data sets and reproduce, and thereby, validate results. Provenance has become even more critical in the web environment in which data from distributed sources and of varying integrity can be combined and derived. Recent work by the W3C on the PROV model provides the foundation for semantically-rich, interoperable, and web-compatible provenance metadata. We apply that model to complex, but characteristic, provenance examples of social science data, describe scenarios that make scholarly use of those provenance descriptions, and propose a manner for encoding this provenance metadata within the widely-used DDI metadata standard.

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