The distributed nature of modern research emphasizes the importance of collecting and sharing the history of digital and physical material, to improve the reproducibility of experiments and the quality and reusability of results. Yet, the application of the current methodologies to record provenance information is largely scattered, leading to silos of provenance information at different granularities. To tackle this fragmentation, we developed the Common Provenance Model, a set of guidelines for the generation of interoperable provenance information, and to allow the reconstruction and the navigation of a continuous provenance chain. This work presents the first version of the model, available online, based on the W3C PROV Data Model and the Provenance Composition pattern.
Keywords: Common Provenance Model; Provenance Composition; Provenance information; W3C PROV; distributed processes.