Modelling history with PROV-O: a field report

Until recently, Dutch government organisations were obliged under the Freedom of Information Act to supply information on request. With the new Open Government law, however, information that is not confidential must be published proactively. KOOP, the government’s publications office, is building a high-performance platform to realize this. An important aspect of the information to be published on this platform is that it should conform to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). With millions of documents from thousands of organisations expected to be published each year, this requirement poses an interesting challenge.||||Since 2019, work is underway to create an open, standardized RDF knowledge graph to support this. The knowledge graph contains an ontology that serves as a semantic model for, among other things, the necessary metadata structures. In addition, however, it also comprises a set of thesauri, and, equally important, a set of registries. These registries contain authentic information about government organizations. First and foremost, this concerns their identity and existence. A limited amount of historical information is also present in these registries. For certain use cases, it is important to be aware of, say, name changes in an organization, so that the recall and precision of queries by organization can be controlled.||||This presentation will introduce the outlines of the knowledge graph in its current form. It will then zoom in on the question on how to model history. This concerns historical data about organizations, but also about documents. Some discussion is offered about how PROV-O has been leveraged to achieve this, contrasting this approach to some known alternatives. Also covered is how PROV-O can be used to express so-called FRBR-categories with minimal ontological commitment. Finally, we discuss the notion of ‘time-slice’ or ‘historical version’ and how to deal with some formal ontological aspects of this, building on UFO and Guizzardi’s work on this topic.||