The systematic large-scale production of digital scientific
objects, the diversity of the processes involved and the
complexity of describing historical relationships among
them, imposes the need for an innovative knowledge
management system capable to handle all the semantic
information in order to monitor, manage and document
the origins and derivation of products in a flexible
manner. We have implemented CRMdig, an extension
of the CIDOC-CRM ontology, which is able to capture
the modeling and the query requirements regarding the
provenance of digital objects for e-science. CRMdig is
particularly rich in describing the physical circumstances
of scientific observation resulting in digital data.