In the study of fine art, provenance refers to the documented history of some art object. Given that documented history, the object attains an authority that allows scholars to appreciate its importance with respect to other works, whereas, in the absence of such history, the object may be treated with some skepticism. Our IT landscape is evolving as illustrated by applications that are open, composed dynamically, and that discover results and services on the fly. Against this challenging background, it is crucial for users to be able to have confidence in the results produced by such applications. If the provenance of data produced by computer systems could be determined as it can for some works of art, then users, in their daily applications, would be able to interpret and judge the quality of data better. We introduce a provenance lifecycle and advocate an open approach based on two key principles to support a notion of provenance in computer systems: documentation of execution and user-tailored provenance queries.

Sensor networks face a number of challenges when deployed in unpredictable environments under dynamic, quickly changeable demands, and when shared by many partners, which is often the case in military and security applications. To partially address these challenges, we present a novel target tracking algorithm that can be deployed on various sensor nodes and invoked dynamically when needed by the presence of targets. We also demonstrate that an auction-based mechanism can be used to provide efficient and localized wireless sensor network congestion management for bursty traffic of abstract services based just on user-assigned priorities to different services and the quality of information provided by the services. We present results from using this auction mechanism to resolve congestion caused by packets from competing target tracking missions.

There is a significant challenge in designing, optimizing, deploying and managing complex sensor networks over heterogeneous communications infrastructures. The ITA Sensor Fabric addresses these challenges in the areas of sensor identification and discovery, sensor access and control, and sensor data consumability, by extending the message bus model commonly found in commercial IT infrastructures out to the edge of the network. In this paper we take the message bus model further into a semantically rich, model-based design and analysis approach that considers the sensor network and its contained services as a Service Oriented Architecture. We present an application of a hierarchic schema for nested service definitions together with an initial ontology that describes the assets and services deployed in a sensor network infrastructure.

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Our previous work has explored the application of enterprise middleware techniques at the edge of the network to address the challenges of delivering complex sensor network solutions over heterogeneous communications infrastructures. In this paper, we develop this approach further into a practicable, semantically rich, model-based design and analysis approach that considers the sensor network and its contained services as a service-oriented architecture. The proposed model enables a systematic approach to service composition, analysis (using domain-specific techniques), and deployment. It also enables cross intelligence domain integration to simplify intelligence gathering, allowing users to express queries in structured natural language (Controlled English).