The IVOA Provenance Data Model

A provenance data model is currently discussed within the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The objective is to describe how provenance information can be modelled, stored and exchanged within the astronomical community in a standardized way. We follow the definition of provenance as proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), i.e. that "provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness". Such provenance information in astronomy is important to enable any scientist to trace back the origin of a dataset (e.g. an image, spectrum, catalog or single points in a spectral energy distribution or a light curve), a document (e.g. an article, a technical note) or a device (e.g. a camera, a telescope), learn about the people and organizations involved in a project and assess the usefulness of a dataset, document or device for her own scientific work. In the astronomy domain, the user generally requires additional information on the activities, in the form of description, configuration and context information.