SUMMARY
The open government movements facilitate the transparency and sharing of government data. Provenance of open government data (OGD) describes source information related to who, how, where, when and other information over the lifecycle of OGD. Provenance of OGD should be tracked for high-quality and trustworthiness of OGD. Currently, OGD portals provide provenance through general metadata elements, such as creator, provider, creation date, publication date, and issued time. In China, local OGD portals define their own metadata profiles. However, these metadata elements in different OGD portals vary and there is no specific and well-defined provenance description scheme for OGD in China. Therefore, this paper is purposed to survey the current provision situation of provenance metadata elements in 42 China OGD portals and conduct the unification of provenance elements based on the survey results. This research is meaningful to facilitate formal description of provenance information in China OGD portals.