DOSN-PROV: Model and Services for Data Provenance in Decentralized Social Networks.
Decentralized Social Networks, Provenance, Ontology, Provenance Services, Capture of Provenance, Provenance Tracking
The information on social networks cannot always verify the origin, the paths described, and the registered modifications. Issues such as these generate uncertainty and distrust in processes and interactions in OSNs. With the emergence of DOSNs and the increase in the number of active users in these networks, it becomes essential to develop effective solutions regarding the provenance of decentralized data. The provenance is a factor of considerable importance because it is possible to evaluate the information's authenticity, reliability, and relevance through its results. Tracing and capture of provenance are critical tasks for DOSNs since they produce answers about the steps go through by the information. The large volume of data, the speed of generation and sharing of information, and the decentralized storage strategy make the provenance of DOSNs a non-trivial task. Thus, this work proposes the PROV-DOSN provenance ontological model, a specific model for the DOSNs domain, based on the PROV-O specification from W3C. In addition, this work also proposes services based on the DOSN-PROV to support the capture and tracking of provenance in DOSNs. We evaluated DOSN-PROV in two steps to demonstrate compliance with the proposed domain. Finally, the services underwent a performance evaluation, and their results indicated acceptable response times for the capture and tracking tasks.