Cross-Platform Provenance

Abstract

A number of systems have been developed to track workflows — for example, CMCS helps chemists document combustion research, ^myGrid with Taverna aids biologists, and ESSW is used by earth scientists. Since most infrastructure developed to record the provenance of data has targeted specific fields, the projects were not easily be re-purposed for different domains. The systems differed with respect to what data was captured, the types of operations performed, how the data was stored, and the kinds of queries supported. Since 2006, a community of two dozen research groups interested in data annotation, derivation, and provenance have met regularly “to understand the capabilities of different provenance systems and the expressiveness of their provenance representations,” and then iteratively created an Open Provenance Model (OPM) aimed at increasing the interoperability of systems.