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

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 .