Where did you hear that? Information and the Sources They Come From.

One current challenge in linked science is to adequately describe where a piece of information in the linked science cloud came from. Provenance models, such as Proof Markup Language (PML), have developed methods for expressing simple relationships between information and the sources of information. We argue that the representation of where information comes from is central to trusting linked data in scientific applications. We introduce the notion of a model of information source and the usage of the source to obtain information by describing the Proof Markup Languages notion of source usage and show how this relationship can be modeled in a library science schema, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Resources (FRBR). We discuss how these kinds of representations are critical to provenance models.