The W3C Provenance Working has published a Last Call Working Draft for the PROV Notation.

We would be grateful for your feedback on the Media Type section of the specification.

1. Media Type Section: http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-n/#media-type
2. Text Version: http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/prov/raw-file/default/model/media-type-request.txt

We look forward to hearing your comments,

Text version is included below, and followed by the last call announcement.

Best regards,
Luc Moreau
W3C PROV-WG co-chair

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The media type of PROV-N is text/provenance-notation. The content encoding of PROV-N content is UTF-8.

Contact:
Ivan Herman
See also:
How to Register a Media Type for a W3C Specification
Internet Media Type registration, consistency of use
TAG Finding 3 June 2002 (Revised 4 September 2002)
The Internet Media Type / MIME Type for PROV-N is "text/provenance-notation".

It is recommended that PROV-N files have the extension ".provn" (all lowercase) on all platforms.

It is recommended that PROV-N files stored on Macintosh HFS file systems be given a file type of "TEXT".

This information that follows is being submitted to the IESG for review, approval, and registration with IANA.

Type name:
text

Subtype name:
provenance-notation

Required parameters:
None

Optional parameters:
charset — this parameter is mandatory. The value of charset is always UTF-8.

Encoding considerations:
The syntax of PROV-N is expressed over code points in Unicode [UNICODE5]. The encoding is always UTF-8 [UTF-8].
Unicode code points may also be expressed using an \uXXXX (U+0 to U+FFFF) or \UXXXXXXXX syntax (for U+10000 onwards) where X is a hexadecimal digit [0-9A-F]

Security considerations:
PROV-N is a general-purpose language for describing the provenance of things; applications may evaluate given data to infer more descriptions or to dereference URIs, invoking the security considerations of the scheme for that URI. Note in particular, the privacy issues in [RFC3023] section 10 for HTTP URIs. Data obtained from an inaccurate or malicious data source may lead to inaccurate or misleading conclusions, as well as the dereferencing of unintended URIs. Care must be taken to align the trust in consulted resources with the sensitivity of the intended use of the data.
PROV-N is used to express the provenance of arbitrary application data; security considerations will vary by domain of use. Security tools and protocols applicable to text (e.g. PGP encryption, MD5 sum validation, password-protected compression) may also be used on PROV-N documents. Security/privacy protocols must be imposed which reflect the sensitivity of the embedded information.
PROV-N can express data which is presented to the user, for example, by means of label attributes. Application rendering strings retrieved from untrusted PROV-N documents must ensure that malignant strings may not be used to mislead the reader. The security considerations in the media type registration for XML ([RFC3023] section 10) provide additional guidance around the expression of arbitrary data and markup.
PROV-N is a language for describing the provenance of things, and therefore a PROV-N document is metadata for other resources. Untrusted PROV-N documents may mislead its consumers by indicating that a third-party resource has a reputable lineage, when it has not. Provenance of PROV-N document should be sought.
PROV-N uses qualified names mappeable to IRIs as term identifiers. Applications interpreting data expressed in PROV-N should address the security issues of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) [RFC3987] Section 8, as well as Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax [RFC3986] Section 7.
Multiple IRIs may have the same appearance. Characters in different scripts may look similar (a Cyrillic "о" may appear similar to a Latin "o"). A character followed by combining characters may have the same visual representation as another character (LATIN SMALL LETTER E followed by COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT has the same visual representation as LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE). Any person or application that is writing or interpreting data in PROV-N must take care to use the IRI that matches the intended semantics, and avoid IRIs that make look similar. Further information about matching of similar characters can be found in Unicode Security Considerations [UNISEC] and Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) [RFC3987] Section 8.
Interoperability considerations:

There are no known interoperability issues.

Published specification:
PROV-N: The Provenance Notation, Moreau, Missier, (eds), Cheney, Soiland-Reyes http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-n/

Applications which use this media type:
No widely deployed applications are known to use this media type. It may be used by some web services and clients consuming their data.

Additional information:
Magic number(s):
PROV-N documents may have the strings 'bundle' near the beginning of the document.

File extension(s):
".provn"

Base URI:
There are no constructs in the PROV-N Syntax to change the Base IRI.

Macintosh file type code(s):
"TEXT"

Person & email address to contact for further information:
public-prov-comments@w3.org

Intended usage:
COMMON

Restrictions on usage:
None

Author/Change controller:
The PROV-N specification is the product of the World Wide Web Consortium's PROV Working Group. The W3C has change control over this specification.

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	PROV Last Call on three documents: Request for Review
Resent-Date:	Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:53:27 +0000
Resent-From:	<team-prov-chairs@w3.org>
Date:	Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:52:57 +0200
From:	Paul Groth <p.t.groth@vu.nl>
To:	chairs@w3.org Chairs <chairs@w3.org>
CC:	<team-prov-chairs@w3.org>

Dear All,

The Provenance Working has published the following three drafts as
Last Call Working Drafts:

- PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model [1]
- PROV-O: The PROV Ontology [2]
- PROV-N: The Provenance Notation [3]

We are looking for your feedback. To introduce you to the
specifications, we also have published an updated Primer [4]. You'll
also find an overview blog post at [5].

The Last Call period ends 18 September 2012. Comments can be sent to
public-prov-comments@w3.org

We are particularly looking for feedback from the following groups:

- Semantic Web Coordination Group
- RDFa Working Group
- RDF Working Group
- Internationalization Activity
- MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group

We will follow-up with the chairs of these groups individually
outlining specific areas where feedback will be useful.

We look forward to hearing your comments.

regards,
Paul


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-prov-dm-20120724/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-prov-o-20120724/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-prov-n-20120724/
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-prov-primer-20120724/
[5] http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2012/07/24/last-call-3-working-drafts-for-provenance-interchange/

-- 
--
Dr. Paul Groth (p.t.groth@vu.nl)
http://www.few.vu.nl/~pgroth/
Assistant Professor
- Knowledge Representation & Reasoning Group |
  Artificial Intelligence Section | Department of Computer Science
- The Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam