2025/01/01 by Fabio Mariani, Mariani, Fabio
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Human-in-the-loop #Kunstgeschichte #Linked Data #Provenienzforschung #Research Data Management Practices #Scientific Computing and Data Management
paper · doi:10.17175/2025_012
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
Provenance documents the history of cultural objects, providing evidence of authenticity and ownership, and ensuring ethical accountability. Publishing provenance as Linked Open Data (LOD) enhances accessibility, interoperability, and large-scale analysis, addressing the limitations of textual records. However, the transformation of provenance information into structured LOD remains constrained by labour-intensive extraction processes and technical barriers to adoption. This paper introduces PROV-A (the Provenance App), a web-based tool designed to streamline the creation and publication of provenance information as LOD. PROV-A facilitates the integration of external automated data extraction workflows, such as natural language processing (NLP), with human validation, balancing efficiency with scholarly rigour. A case study using provenance records from the Art Institute of Chicago illustrates how PROV-A enables users to refine automatically extracted data, preserve historical ambiguities, and support provenance analysis. By lowering technical barriers and fostering a human-in-the-loop approach, PROV-A improves the scalability and accuracy of provenance research, making LOD more accessible to cultural institutions.