Tag: Tutorial

• Installing ProvToolbox on macOS

  ProvToolbox is a useful command line tool for validating and visualizing PROV documents, but unfortunately it can be a bit of a challenge to install on Windows and on macOS because of its dependency requirements.

  This post suggests three step-by-step methods of installing ProvToolbox on your Mac – you should follow the method you feel most comfortable with, but can try the other methods in case of problems.

  Table of content

  1. Overview of requirements
     1. Software packaging for macOS
  2. Conda
     1. Installing Graphviz and OpenJDK with Conda
  3. HomeBrew
     1. Installing Graphviz with HomeBrew
     2. Installing OpenJDK with HomeBrew
  4. Installing manually
     1. Installing AdoptOpenJDK manually
     2. Installing Graphviz manually
  5. Installing ProvToolbox
     1. Using ProvToolbox from VSCode

  Overview of requirements

  As of 2020-08, ProvToolbox 0.9.5 is the latest release, which requires:

• Installing ProvToolbox in Windows

  While there are several tools available for validating and visualizing PROV, the ProvToolbox is perhaps the most useful for validating PROV-N syntax. However, the normal releases does not run in Windows due to a operating system restriction for command line and folder path length.

  We have suggested a fix, but while we wait for that, here we describe a patch build that should work on Windows. We also show how to install dependencies: Java for executing ProvToolbox, and Graphviz for visualization. (See also macOS install).

• Tracking versions with PAV

  The PAV ontology specializes the W3C PROV-O standard to give a lightweight approach to recording details about a resource, giving its Provenance, Authorship and Versioning. Our paper on PAV explores all of these aspects in details. In this blog post we discuss Versioning as modelled by PAV, including their hierarchical organization.

  • Version numbers {#versionnumbers}
    • Semantic versioning {#semver}
  • Making versions retrievable {#retrievable}
  • Ordering previous versions {#ordering}
    • Providing provenance for each version {#each-version}
  • Related work {#relatedwork}
    • PROV-O revisions {#provo}
    • Qualified revisions {#qualified}
    • DC Terms {#dcterms}
    • schema.org {#schemaorg}
  • Organize the versions {#organize}
    • Earlier versions {#earlier}
    • Has a version (snapshots) {#hasVersion}
    • Current version {#current}
    • Hierarchies all the way down {#hierarchies}

  Versioning is commonly used for software releases (e.g. Windows 8.1, Firefox 26, Python 3.3.2), but increasingly also for datasets and documents. For the purpose of provenance, a version number allows the declaration of the current state of a resource, which can be cross-checked against release notes and used for references, for instance to indicate which particular version of a dataset was used in producing an analysis report.