PROV ontology supports alignment of observational data (models)

The W3C PROV ontology provides a flexible process-flow model that can capture many specific applications. A provenance trace is the retrospective view of a workflow, with specific instance data added. Thus it provides a basis for the description of any chain of activities which generate interesting outputs, such as observations, actuations, or acts of sampling. Furthermore, its relatively generic structure and naming allows it to be used as an alignment bridge with other ontologies that have previously challenged simple mappings. In this paper, we will show a harmonization of a number of important ontology patterns that can be linked through the PROV-O OWL implementation of PROV. The alignments stack is as follows: PROV-O aligned to W3C OWL-Time PROV-O aligned to BFO W3C SSN/SOSA aligned to PROV-O OBOE, OBI and BCO (from the obo foundation) aligned to SOSA/SSN and thus PROV-O Some of the alignments have been proposed previously, but the set described here both augments them and is larger in aggregate than previous work. The availability of these alignments supports the fusion of data from a range of disciplines such as earth and environmental sciences, in particular observational data where the act of sampling and observation is understood in a provenance context.