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A Canonical Form for PROV Documents and Its Application to Equality, Signature, and Validation

Published:18 August 2017Publication History
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Abstract

We present a canonical form for prov that is a normalized way of representing prov documents as mathematical expressions. As opposed to the normal form specified by the prov-constraints recommendation, the canonical form we present is defined for all prov documents, irrespective of their validity, and it can be serialized in a unique way. The article makes the case for a canonical form for prov and its potential uses, namely comparison of prov documents in different formats, validation, and signature of prov documents. A signature of a prov document allows the integrity and the author of provenance to be ascertained; since the signature is based on the canonical form, these checks are not tied to a particular encoding, but can be performed on any representation of prov.

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  1. A Canonical Form for PROV Documents and Its Application to Equality, Signature, and Validation

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
            ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 17, Issue 4
            Special Issue on Provenance of Online Data and Regular Papers
            November 2017
            165 pages
            ISSN:1533-5399
            EISSN:1557-6051
            DOI:10.1145/3133307
            • Editor:
            • Munindar P. Singh
            Issue’s Table of Contents

            Copyright © 2017 Owner/Author

            Publisher

            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 18 August 2017
            • Accepted: 1 December 2016
            • Revised: 1 November 2016
            • Received: 1 July 2016
            Published in toit Volume 17, Issue 4

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