provenance metadata for shared product model databases etiel petrinja, vlado stankovski & Žiga...

Provenance Metadata for Shared Product Model Databases

Etiel Petrinja, Vlado Stankovski & Žiga Turk

University of LjubljanaFaculty of Civil and Geodetic

EngineeringChair of Construction Informatics

Provenance Metadata for Shared Product Model Databases2/14

Index

• Basic facts about provenance

• What are ontologies?

• Provenance in the IFC standard

• Provenance ontology

• Provenance service prototype


What is Provenance?• Provenance data is usually Metadata:

– intended for sharing, retrieving, integrating, aggregating and processing.

– generated with the hope that it is comprehensive enough to be future-proofed.

– recorded for those who we do not yet know will use the object and who will likely use it in a different way.

– machine computational: free text is of limited help.• Provenance is the knowledge that makes

– An item interpretable and reusable within a context– An item reproducible or at least repeatable.

• Its part of the information model of any system


Provenance data elements

• Legal – Who is responsible?

• Professional – Why does it have such value?

• Managerial – Who is doing the work here?

• Re-use – Can we re-use the process next time we do something similar?

Trust

Preservation

Security

Scalability

Generality

Customisability

Provenance data requirem

ents

Other


Provenance Granularity

• Different levels of granularity correspond to different use-cases

• Knowledge level (annotations-free text or in a structured/semi-structured form)

• Organization level (organization name, author name…)

• Product or Process level (which workflow has been used and how)

• Data level (derivation paths of data results from services)


Ontologies

• An ontology is an engineering artefact:– It is constituted by a specific

vocabulary used to describe a certain reality

– Plus a set of explicit assumptions regarding the intended meaning of the vocabulary

• Thus an ontology describes a formal specification of a certain domain:– Shared understanding of a domain of interest– Formal and machine manipulative model of a domain of interest

• Language - OWL language(s):• Application - Protege


IFC standard and provenance• The main entity connected with provenance issues in the

IFC standard is the IFCOwnerHistory entity• It is linked to the IFCRoot entity and thus inherited by

every single entity of the IFC standard that has IFCRoot as its highest ancestor

• IFCOwnerHistory entity has several sub entities with different attributes:– ifcAuditTrail (7)– ifcApplication (3)– ifcOrganization (4)– ifcAddress (13)– ifcPersonAndOrganization (4)– ifcPerson (6)


Provenance ontology

• We have inserted in our ontology some concepts that were already present in the IFC standard

• If we use the OWL notation for specifying ontologies, we have a lot of APIs and other tools that are already implemented and available

• For a more precise cover of the conceptualisation regarding provenance, some additional rules, axioms, concepts and properties should be added


Provenance prototype

• Ontology management: Jena toolkit

• Separate ontology concepts/properties and instances files

• Aggregation of smaller ontologies into bigger one

• Scalability problems with long IFC files

• Persistent storage in a MySQL database


Provenance prototype reasoning

Ontology

Ontology Service

Service API

Ontology Ontology

Application Reasoner Reasoner sits outside the Ontology Service. Requests are answered w.r.t. the basic facts asserted in the ontology.

Ontology Service

Service API

Application

Reasoner

Reasoner sits inside the Ontology Service. Requests are answered w.r.t. the semantics.

Ontology Ontology Ontology


Provenance prototype architecture


Web user interface


Discussion

• Converting part of the IFC standard into an ontology?

• Standardising the provenance saving mechanisms and elements

• Specifying the level of granularity of the provenance metadata

• Implementing a more general provenance service


Questions

• ???

provenance metadata for shared product model databases etiel petrinja, vlado stankovski & Žiga...

Documents