Cultural and scientific data cannot be understood without knowledge about the provenance (the origin, context or history). Provenance provides a critical foundation for assessing authenticity, enabling trust, and allowing reproducibility. Provenance metadata are data describing objects, people, places, times which are causally related by events. They are event centric and must be described in a historical order to ensure that there are no references to non-existent (non-recorded) events or objects. Nowadays provenance has become even more critical in the web environment where data are sourced not only from established archives, but from many mixed credentialed providers.
The SSHOC Reference Ontology (SSHOCro) proposes an ontological model and RDF schema to be used as a top-level ontology for organizing knowledge and information found distributed across various primary sources of information in the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC). It provides a semantic interoperability framework for the description of the data life cycle used by Social Science and Humanities researchers.