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Capturing provenance of global change information

Global change information demands access to data sources and well-documented provenance to provide the evidence needed to build confidence in scientific conclusions and decision making. A new generation of web technology, the Semantic Web, provides tools for that purpose.

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Figure 1: Global sea-level rise figure associated with the collected metadata records in Table 2.
Figure 2: A part of the provenance information of a journal article depicted with PROV-O and other ontologies.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant through the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under contract S13-94358. The authors thank Jin Guang Zheng, Justin Goldstein, Linyun Fu, Patrick West, Steven Aulenbach, Stephan Zednik, Ana Pinheiro-Privette and Brian Duggan for collaborations in the research project Global Change Information System: Information Model and Semantic Application Prototypes (GCIS-IMSAP). The authors also thank Tim Lebo and Deborah McGuinness for their comments on PROV-O, OPM and PML.

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the planning of the paper. X.M. led the work. P.F. contributed the use-case-driven Semantic Web application method which generated the provenance graph in the global sea-level rise use-case. C.T. participated in use-case analysis and provided suggestions on ontologies to be used. X.M. prepared the figures. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaogang Ma.

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Ma, X., Fox, P., Tilmes, C. et al. Capturing provenance of global change information. Nature Clim Change 4, 409–413 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2141

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