The Open Provenance Model: An Overview

Abstract

3 NCSA 4 PNNL 1 Background Provenance is well understood in the context of art or digital libaries, where it respectively refers to the documented history of an art object, or the documentation of processes in a digital object's life cycle. Interest for provenance in the "e-science community" [12] is also growing, since provenance is perceived as a crucial component of workflow systems that can help scientists ensure reproducibility of their scientific analyses and processes [2,4]. Against this background, the International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW'06), held on May 3-5, 2006 in Chicago, involved some 50 participants interested in the issues of data provenance, process documentation, data derivation, and data annotation [7]. During a session on provenance standardization, a consensus began to emerge, whereby the provenance research community needed to understand better the capabilities of the different systems, the representations they used for provenance, their similarities, their differences, and the rationale that motivated their designs. Hence, the first Provenance Challenge [1] was born, and from the outset, the challenge was set up to be informative rather than competitive. The first Provenance Challenge was set up in order to provide a forum for the community to understand the capabilities of different provenance systems and the expressiveness of their provenance representations. Participants simulated or ran a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging workflow, from which they implemented and executed a pre-identified set of "provenance queries". Sixteen teams responded to the challenge, and reported their experience in a journal special issue [9]. The first Provenance Challenge was followed by the second Provenance Challenge [1], aiming at establishing inter-operability of systems, by exchanging provenance information. During discussions, the thirteen teams that responded to the second challenge found out that there was substantial agreement on a core representation of provenance. As a result, following a workshop in August 2007, in Salt Lake City, a data model was crafted by the authors and released as the Open Provenance Model (OPM v1.00) [8]. On June 19th 2008, some twenty participants attended the first OPM workshop, held after IPAW'08 [3], to discuss the OPM specification. Minutes of the workshop and recommendations [5] were published, and led to the current version (v1.01) of the Open Provenance Model [10].

Trust and context in cyberspace

“…42 This last is intended -or so its designers claim -to support representation of the provenance of non-digital as well as digital resources; it is also designed to allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems. 43 As noted above, much work in information technology has been concerned with the provenance of data, and from an archival viewpoint this work sometimes displays a rather limited perspective. Provenance, one team of computing specialists has asserted, is 'information that helps determine the derivation history of a data product, starting from its original sources'.…”

Towards Automatic Capturing of Semi-structured Process Provenance

“…Further, the acquired provenance information could be made accessible in different provenance models like e.g. the Open Provenance Model (OPM) [12] or the value centric model (TVC) [13]. However these are just alternative representations of the derived provenance data, while the focus of this paper is on acquiring the provenance data rather then how to represent them.…”

Using Domain-Specific Data to Enhance Scientific Workflow Steering Queries

“…Each activity is decomposed in several parallel tasks (Task) which consumes parameter values (Relation, Field and Value) and data files (DataFile). Since this provenance schema is based on the OPM recommendation [26], the classes Activity and Task are mapped as Processes. The class DataFile, Relation and Value are mapped as Artifacts.…”