Mapping Geospatial Metadata to Open Provenance Model

This paper maps the data lineage entities in ISO19115 and ISO19115-2, the metadata standards of the International Organization for Standardization for geographic information and for imagery and gridded data [ISO geospatial metadata (GMD)], to the entities in open provenance model (OPM). The term “map” refers to establishing a correspondence between the said entities in ISO GMD and OPM. Presently, many geospatial data available in spatial data infrastructures (SDI) are described using ISO GMD. Its structure, however, makes tracing the provenance of these data a challenging task. OPM prioritizes causal relationships between things for capturing the workflow applied to particular data, making it easier to trace the data provenance. The mapping in this paper provides a convenient means to trace the provenance of data through the OPM causal relations and evaluate the fitness for use of these data, a necessary step toward data integration. This paper uses the notion of process to identify various data processing activities encoded in ISO GMD, the resource and the agent types involved in these activities, and state changes. A software prototype to carry out the mapping is developed. The mapping result is encoded in the resource description framework format to permit integral use of geospatial data in SDI and the data from the open data world. An exemplar metadata in ISO GMD from the National Oceanographic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is used to demonstrate the feasibility to convert from the ISO GMD data lineage entities to the OPM entities.