Provenance: The Bridge Between Experiments and Data

Current scientific applications are often structured as workflows and rely on workflow systems to compile abstract experiment designs into enactable workflows that utilise the best available resources. The automation of this step and of the workflow enactment, hides the details of how results have been produced. Knowing how compilation and enactment occurred allows results to be reconnected with the experiment design. We investigate how provenance helps scientists to connect their results with the actual execution that took place, their original experiment and its inputs and parameters.

PrIMe: A Methodology for Developing Provenance-Aware Applications

Provenance refers to the past processes that brought about a given (version of an) object, item or entity. By knowing the provenance of data, users can often better understand, trust, reproduce, and validate it. A provenance-aware application has the functionality to answer questions regarding the provenance of the data it produces, by using documentation of past processes. PrIMe is a software engineering technique for adapting application designs to enable them to interact with a provenance middleware layer, thereby making them provenance-aware. In this article, we specify the steps involved in applying PrIMe, analyse its effectiveness, and illustrate its use with two case studies, in bioinformatics and medicine.

The Open Provenance Model Core Specification (v1.1)

The Open Provenance Model is a model of provenance that is designed to meet the following requirements: (1) To allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, by means of a compatibility layer based on a shared provenance model. (2) To allow developers to build and share tools that operate on such a provenance model. (3) To define provenance in a precise, technology-agnostic manner. (4) To support a digital representation of provenance for any 'thing', whether produced by computer systems or not. (5) To allow multiple levels of description to coexist. (6) To define a core set of rules that identify the valid inferences that can be made on provenance representation. This document contains the specification of the Open Provenance Model (v1.1) resulting from a community-effort to achieve inter-operability in the Provenance Challenge series.