Exploring Provenance for E-Learning Ontologies

Introduction

Provenance is a piece of data or record that explains entities, people, persons, or institutions, and the processes involved in creating, altering, or delivering data or objects. When information is reprocessed, the provenance of the data specifies why it should be trusted, how it will be merged with other data sources, and how its originators will be identified (Time Ontology in OWL, 2020). Users in an open database or cloud, such as the web, encounter data that is frequently inconsistent or suspect; provenance can help users make trusting decisions.

Information sharing, information examination, and the dispersion of information in dynamic, significant concerns have gotten to technologists, and investigators: how would you be able to trust the information that you depend on? Confidence in information depends on numerous factors. In this context, knowing where information comes from and how it is handled is crucial. Addressing these inquiries enables information clients to approximate whether the guaranteed origins of information are genuine, whether information has been altered, or whether it is being used in reasonable and genuine ways. Information provenance and genealogy address a significant number of these issues, guaranteeing that information stays detectable.

The semantic web's multiple levels provide efficient retrieval and search methods. Despite this, inaccurate, faulty, or misleading information is readily available on the internet. With the growing amount of material available on the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between true and false information. As a result, determining the trustworthiness of documents on the semantic web becomes critical.

Provenance can be defined as records that describe or inform the activities, actors, and entities involved in the creation, update, and use of web data. Provenance is important because it helps answer questions like:

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  When was a data item created?

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  Who made the data object?

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  Who made the data item more current?

Provenance enables semantic web agents to trace the history of information contained in repositories, proving the reliability of the data retrieved from them. Provenance also provides:

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  Valuable information about data quality and trustworthiness.

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  Information that tells the users, the ontology may be divided into the form:

  • Entity- A physical, intellectual, digital, or another type of anything with other definite characteristics; Real or fictional entities can exist.

  • Activity- Consuming, processing, editing, modifying, relocating, using, or generating entities are all examples of activities that occur throughout time and influence or affect entities.

  • Agent- An agent is something that is in charge of the conduct of a task, the presence of an entity, or the acts of another agent.

Allows users to predict the accuracy of data thus helping them to associate an element of trust with them.

Figure 1.

The relationship between entity, agent, and activity

In the proposed ‘Academic Ontology’, all components in the provenance statements will fall into one of three categories:

• Entity - May be represented as book/courses: e.g. Math or CS module.

• Agent - Responsible for processes/ acted on behalf of may be represented as Teachers: e.g. Dr. SPT, Mr. AKB

• Activity – ‘is teaching’, ‘is modified by’, ‘is altered by’ is the process of modification/alteration carried by other agents & entities.