GMEOW Provenance Module

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/provenance
• Tier: core
• Group: core

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 13 terms and contributes 25 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/documents
• gmeow:slices/events
• gmeow:slices/kernel

Consumers

• Every attributed fact (P9): statement-layer attribution and confidence, import activities and their transaction time, derivation/generation lineage, and GTS chain-of-custody.

Local Map

Examples

Import Lineage

• Source: slices/core/provenance/examples/import-lineage.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:CreativeWork, gmeow:ImportActivity, gmeow:SoftwareAgent, gmeow:Summary, gmeow:confidence, gmeow:contentDigest, gmeow:ingestedAt, gmeow:name, gmeow:sourceLocation, gmeow:sourceModifiedAt
• External prefixes: xsd

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: ingest lineage on the PROV triad. A machine-generated
# summary records WHERE it came from (gmeow:wasDerivedFrom → the source), HOW it
# was produced (gmeow:wasGeneratedBy → an Activity), and WHO ran it
# (gmeow:wasAttributedTo → an Agent). The importer is a gmeow:SoftwareAgent that
# self-records its own run — the producer of the provenance is inside it.
# (How much to trust the derivation is gmeow:confidence — an annotation on the
# derivation STATEMENT, carried in the RDF-1.2 statement layer rather than as an
# A-box property on the individual, so it is out of scope for this flat example.)
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/provenance/> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

# --- The source: an imported work, pinned by location + content digest.
ex:sourcePaper a gmeow:CreativeWork ;
    gmeow:sourceLocation  "/imports/papers/smith-2020-erosion.pdf" ;
    gmeow:sourceModifiedAt "2020-07-11T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:contentDigest   "blake3:9f86d081884c7d659a2feaa0c55ad015a3bf4f1b2b0b822cd15d6c15b0f00a08" .

# --- The activity and the agent that performed it (the importer self-records).
ex:import a gmeow:ImportActivity ;
    gmeow:ingestedAt       "2026-06-14T09:30:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:wasAssociatedWith ex:importer .

ex:importer a gmeow:SoftwareAgent ;
    gmeow:name "gmeow PDF summariser"@en .

# --- The derived artefact: WHERE from, HOW made, and WHO by.
ex:abstract a gmeow:Summary ;
    gmeow:wasDerivedFrom  ex:sourcePaper ;
    gmeow:wasGeneratedBy  ex:import ;
    gmeow:wasAttributedTo ex:importer .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Linkages

• Rows: 25
• Projection profiles: dcat, dcterms, oai_dc, web-annotation
• External vocabularies: dc, dcterms, oa, prov, rdf, wd

Guide

Provenance — activities, attribution, and the statement clocks' epistemic siblings

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/provenance · tier: core The PROV-O superset layer: who made it, what produced it, and how sure we are — on every statement in every slice.

A claim without provenance is the failure mode this ontology was written against (Principle 14: an LLM output is a claim, not a truth). This slice supplies the two halves of the answer. The individual half is a compact PROV-O-aligned activity model (Principle 5): activities that generate entities, agents that are attributed or associated, derivation chains from source to extraction to summary. The statement half is a set of cross-cutting annotation properties (confidence, importanceLevel, mappedFrom) that ride on the RDF-1.2 reified-statement layer (Principles 2–3), so any fact in any slice carries its epistemic weight without a single new relator.

On the claim spine (Source → Chunk → EvidenceSpan → Claim, Principle 14) this slice is the chain of custody: the ImportActivity that ingested the Source, the wasDerivedFrom chain from Source to Chunk to extraction, and the confidence annotation on the final Claim. The three epistemic axes never bridge (Principle 9): gmeow:accordingTo says whose frame holds a claim, the wasDerivedFrom chain back through its ImportActivity says which source recorded it, and gmeow:confidence says how sure we are — a neutral archive can record a partisan claim, and a claim can be high-confidence yet from a frame we dispute. (gmeow:wasAttributedTo plays a different role entirely: it ascribes responsibility for an entity to an agent — see below.)

Activities

gmeow:Activity

Something that occurs over time and acts upon entities — creating, transforming, using, attributing. A gufo:EventType under gmeow:Event, so the temporal slice's clocks and the events slice's participation machinery apply unchanged (Principle 4: one canonical event model).

gmeow:ImportActivity

The ingestion act: an activity that consumed an external envelope (a vCard file, a mail archive, a GTS package) and recorded the claims it carried. Carries gmeow:ingestedAt — the transaction clock: when the system learned the claims, held strictly apart from assertedAt (when someone claimed them) and validFrom/validUntil (when they hold). Three clocks, never collapsed.

gmeow:wasGeneratedBy

Entity → Activity: the activity that produced an entity. The provenance leg every derived artifact (extraction, summary, embedding, reasoned graph) must carry; pairs with gmeow:observationEvent in the observations slice, which gives the event perspective (when) rather than the generation perspective (by what process).

gmeow:wasAttributedTo · gmeow:wasAssociatedWith

The two attribution directions: wasAttributedTo ascribes an endurant Entity to a responsible Agent; wasAssociatedWith relates an Activity to the agent carrying it out (e.g. the software agent that ran an import). Keep them straight — attributing the output and crewing the process are different facts.

gmeow:wasDerivedFrom

The derivation backbone, deliberately domain-free so events, endurants, and information objects all participate: a TextExtraction from its PDF, a Summary from its source, an embedding from its chunk, a commit from its parent, a trajectory from its sample stream. Confidence and generating agent ride alongside via gmeow:confidence and gmeow:wasGeneratedBy — a derivation is itself a claim about lineage.

gmeow:Summary · gmeow:TextExtraction

The two canonical derived information objects: a condensed (often machine-generated) account, and the text content pulled from a source artifact. Both link back with wasDerivedFrom; both are claims about their source, not replacements for it — the source stays, suppression never erasure (Principle 10).

The statement-level annotations

gmeow:confidence

Epistemic confidence in a claim, in [0,1], attached to the statement it qualifies. An annotation property so the OWL downcast stays DL-clean (Principle 3). Confidence is orthogonal to standpoint and to source (the standpoint doctrine three-axis doctrine) — it answers "how sure", never "who says" or "who recorded".

gmeow:importanceLevel · gmeow:mappedFrom

The remaining statement-level audit pair: relative importance on a 0–10 scale (projection takes the maximum across imports — a solver-layer fold, Principle 12), and the source property a claim was mapped from during ingestion, recorded so every mapping step is auditable end to end (Principle 7: verified by construction).

gmeow:provenance

The Dublin Core custody statement: a free-text account of ownership and custody changes significant for authenticity and interpretation. The human-readable complement to the structured activity chain, not a substitute for it.

Solver boundary & alignment

Trust-weighted aggregation, confidence combination across sources, and transitive derivation closure are computations, never assertions (Principle 12): the slice records the inputs (activities, attributions, per-statement confidence); ranking and fusing them is projection policy. Aligned by reference to PROV-O (prov:Activity, prov:wasGeneratedBy, prov:wasAttributedTo, prov:wasAssociatedWith, prov:wasDerivedFrom) — GMEOW's superset adds the statement-level annotation axis and the transaction clock.

Dependencies

Depends on kernel, documents, and events. Consumed by every attributed fact in the graph: the statement-layer attribution axes, import pipelines, and the GTS package chain-of-custody (Principle 14).