Research Observatory: Warrant as Provenance: Connecting Vocabulary Changes to Their Sources

Warrant as Provenance: Connecting Vocabulary Changes to Their Sources

Yi-Yun Cheng and Inkyung Choi 

Vocabularies change, and users increasingly need to know why. Well-maintained KOSs already keep provenance for their own purposes. The Getty AAT records the sources behind every term and a revision history as Linked Open Data. STW publishes version-to-version deltas. In both, the record of what changed and the record of what evidence exists remain separate. Drawing on three studies (a conceptual model built from DDC editorial records, LLM-assisted extraction of warrant from those records, and the ProvKOS application profile), this talk proposes treating editorial warrant as a PROV chain. An entity points to the typed editorial activity that changed it. The activity points to its warrant, and warrants cite further sources. AAT and STW can adopt this as an optional layer over their existing data, which turns source lists and change logs into queryable editorial decisions.