Base Profiles

The ARC Data Model specification defines three base profiles that together form the general ARC RDM model: Process Provenance, Semantic Designation, and Administrative. The implementation uses one unified object model; the base profiles describe coherent subsets of the same model surface. Decoration profiles add domain-specific refinements on top of them.

Reading Order

1. Process Provenance
2. Semantic Designation
3. Administrative
4. Decorations
5. ARC Workspace Project File
6. Querying

Principles

• Process-centric: experiments and workflows are modeled as processes connecting inputs to outputs.
• Unified: Process Provenance, Semantic Designation, and Administrative properties are available on shared model types rather than split into separate runtime objects.
• Extensible: Annotation and additionalType carry domain-specific information while typed properties cover the common profile surface.
• Representation-aware but model-first: SQL and YAML schemas derive from the markdown spec.

Main Areas

Area	Description
Process Provenance	Provenance model: Dataset, Process, Recipe, Sample, Data, Annotation, FormalParameter, and DefinedTerm
Semantic Designation	Semantic descriptions that connect datasets, samples, and data with bundled annotations
Administrative	Dataset agents, affiliations, citations, licenses, dates, and administrative metadata
Decorations	ISA, Workflow Run, and Datamap decoration profiles layered onto the base profiles
ARC Workspace Project File	Bidirectional rules for partitioning ARC metadata across local resources
Querying	Query use cases and graph traversal notes