Provenance in support of ANDS' four transformations

Abstract

This article introduces the provenance activities that are being carried out at the Australia National Data Services (ANDS). Since its beginning, ANDS has been promoting four data transformations so that Australia’s research data become more valuable and reusable by researchers. Among many other activities that enable the four transformations, ANDS has been encouraging ANDS partners to capture and describe rich context at the time when a data collection is created. In 2015, ANDS funded a number of external projects that had provenance components. In addition, ANDS is working on the interoperability between the schema that is used by the ANDS research data registration and discovery service – Research Data Australia (RDA) – and the W3C recommended provenance standard, Provenance Ontology (PROV-O), and investigating how to enrich the schema to access provenance information. The article concludes by discussing the lessons we learnt and our future planned activity.