Verifiable Provenance for the Web
Authors: Oshani Seneviratne
Venue: WWW
Year: 2025

The web was originally conceived as a decentralized information-sharing medium, where data could be freely created, linked, and shared without inherent restrictions. Over the past three decades, it has transformed into a dynamic, ever-evolving ecosystem where information spreads rapidly, misinformation mutates, and digital assets change hands at an unprecedented scale. While this openness has fueled unparalleled knowledge dissemination, it has also introduced critical challenges surrounding provenance, ethical web data usage, and accountability. The ubiquity of web data, combined with a lack of enforcement mechanisms for data usage restrictions, has led to an increasing number of cases of personal, creative, and proprietary data misuse. Yet, much of our current web intelligence lacks reliable mechanisms to verify content origins, track modifications over time, and assess trustworthiness. As the web continues to expand, it is imperative to address several fundamental questions: (i) How do we grant or revoke consent for future, uncertain web data analyses? (ii) How can web data be ethically repurposed beyond its original intent while ensuring accountability? (iii) What does responsible web data collection, usage, and sharing look like in a world where anonymity and pseudonymity blur individual accountability? These are not just theoretical dilemmas but urgent technical challenges that demand verifiable provenance mechanisms to track data origins, monitor transformations, and enforce responsible reuse. One of the core deficiencies in traditional web infrastructures is their inability to capture temporal changes, making it difficult to verify the evolution of information, trace misinformation back to its source, and establish long-term accountability. The Semantic Web community has pioneered foundational technologies such as the PROV ontology, which provides the foundation for structured, machine-readable infrastructures for provenance tracking and has been incorporated into accountability frameworks like HTTPA (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol with Accountability). While these technologies preserve historical integrity at the semantic level, they lack robust mechanisms for ensuring data immutability, decentralized enforcement, and cryptographic verifiability. Web3 innovations-including decentralized ledgers, cryptographic identity verification, and smart contracts-can bridge this gap by reinforcing provenance metadata with tamper-proof, trustless, and self-executing accountability mechanisms. By integrating these technologies, we can establish a verifiable, enforceable, and resilient provenance framework for the web. Through web3, we can: (i) Ensure provenance remains tamper-proof and immutable through decentralized ledgers. (ii) Automate accountability enforcement with smart contracts that govern data usage rules. (iii) Provide decentralized identity mechanisms to cryptographically link content to verified authorship. (iv) Enable trustless verification through cryptographic proofs, eliminating the need for intermediaries. In this keynote, I will explore how decentralized provenance mechanisms can reshape web accountability, including: (i) Tracking content evolution over time, ensuring persistent attribution and historical context. (ii) Securing the provenance of shared datasets, preventing improper data manipulation while ensuring responsible reuse. (iii) Enforcing semantic agreements between data providers and consumers, with real-world applications in scientific data-sharing ecosystems. (iv) Addressing evolving threats like web spam using Web3-based decentralized trust mechanisms. Beyond tracking provenance, these technologies enable cryptographic ownership of web resources, providing indisputable proof of authorship and modification. Smart contracts further facilitate accountable data usage, ensuring that provenance is not just verifiable but also enforceable and actionable. As we navigate an increasingly AI-driven, dynamic Web, where data is constantly evolving and digital history is continuously rewritten, the integration of Web3 innovations with provenance-aware Semantic Web architectures will be essential for ensuring data integrity, trust, and accountability. In this emerging paradigm, provenance is no longer just about tracing the past-it is about shaping a more transparent, accountable, and decentralized future for the web.