Easy Access to Provenance: An Essential Step Towards Trust on the Web

This paper describes the mechanisms involved in accessing provenance on the Web, according to the new W3C PROV specifications, and how end-users can process this information to make basic trust assessments. Additionally, we illustrate this principle by implementing a practical use case, namely Tim Berners-lee\´s vision of the "Oh, yeah?" button, enabling users to make trust assessments about documents on the web. This implementation leverages the W3C PROV specification to provide user-friendly access to the provenance of Web pages. While the extension described in this paper is specific to one browser, the majority of its components are browser-agnostic.