Provenance in the archives.The challenge of the digital environment

The Principle of Provenance is a pillar of Archival Science. In its very early stages it mostly meant not to intermingle documents from different origins. This view has been challenged in the past fifty years: archival provenance has moved from a simplistic one-to-one relationship to a multi-dimensional concept based on a network of relationships between objects, agents and functions. The digital environment has posed new and unpredictable challenges: digital objects are often aggregations of several different pieces, and it is extremely easy to mix and re-use them, which makes it difficult to trace their provenance. Cloud computing has complicated the picture further. However, new technologies help us to cope with such complexity. Resource Description Framework (RDF) and ontologies can be used to represent provenance in a granular and articulated way that was not even conceivable in the past, giving us the opportunity to review and refine established practices and concepts.