provit 1.1.1

provit is a data provenance annotation and documentation tool. It provides various feature for creation and retrieval of provenance information for data stored in files. The tracking of sources, modifications and merges allows the user to keep a log of all modifications a dataset was subject to. This is especially useful for dataset which are accessed intermittently or part of a long running workflow (e.g. for a scientific thesis). Furthermore, provenance data stored next to the data in an archive can help others to identify quality, value and acutality of the data.

provit does not require any external infrastructure. All information is stored in .prov files right next to the data files as a JSON-LD graph. This makes it the perfect tool for small teams or individual researchers.

To allow interoperatibility, a small subset of the W3C PROV-O vocabulary is implemented. Therefore, the provenance information can easily be merge in a linked data graph if necessary, at a later stage of the project.

provit aims to provided an easy to use interface for users who have never worked with provenance tracking before. You can operate the tool using the

If you feel limited by PROVIT you should have a look at more extensive implementations, e.g.: prov.

Full documentation is available under: provit.readthedocs.io.

$ mkvirtualenv provit
$ pip install provit

$ provit browser

$ provit add FILEPATH [OPTIONS]

$ provit --help

from provit import Provenance

# load prov data for a file, or create new prov for file
prov = Provenance(<filepath>)

# add provenance metadata
prov.add(agents=[ "agent" ], activity="activity", description="...")
prov.add_primary_source("primary_source")
prov.add_sources([ "filepath1", "filepath2" ])

# return provenance as json tree
prov_dict = prov.tree()

# save provenance metadata into "<filename>.prov" file
prov.save()