Provenance tools for Astronomy

Abstract

In the context of astronomy projects, scientists have been confronted with the problem of describing in a standardized way how their data have been produced.As presented in a talk at last year's ADASS, the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) is working on the definition of a Provenance Data Model, compatible with the W3C PROV model, which shall describe how provenance metadata can be modeled, stored and exchanged in astronomy.In this poster, we present the current status of our developments of libraries and tools, mainly open source, which implement the IVOA Provenance Data Model in order to produce, serve, load and visualize provenance information. These implementations are also needed to validate and adjust the data model and the standard definitions for accessing provenance. The provenance tools developed and created for the W3C framework are reused and extended when possible to tackle the domain of astronomical data.