Community:NCore/Provenance

From NSDLWiki

Provenance, in the NCore model, means that all object relationships, metadata statements, and most Properties are attributable to a single Agent in the repository.

The intent of the NCore model is to facilitate assertions and context about or around resources by independant entries. In that sense, the resources themselves are essentially immutable surrogates about which assertions are made. Aggregators, Metadata, and MetadataProviders are the containers provided by the NCore model for making assertions about resources. Thus, it is important that the source of any properties, relationships, or data in these objects be attributable to some source : an Agent.

The exact mechanism by which this occurs is through the aggregatorFor and metadataProviderFor relationships, which directly relate an Aggregator or MetadataProvider to the single Agent that owns them. Metadata objects must be provided by exactly one MetadataProvider, so there there is a single path to an owning Agent through the MetadataProvider whom the Agent also owns. All data, properties, or relationships within a Metadata, MetadataProvider, or Aggregator object are unambiguously attributable to this single owner Agent through the paths formed by these relationships.