Introduction defining context and scope

Provenance, deriving from the French term ‘provenir’ with the meaning ‘to come from’, was originally used to keep track of the chain of ownership of cultural artefacts, such as paintings and sculptures as it determines the value of the artwork. But this concept becomes more and more important also in the data-driven scientific research community. Here it is used synonymously with the word lineage meaning origin or source. The knowledge about provenance of data produced by computer systems could help users to interpret and judge the quality of data a lot better. In the W3C PROV^[1] documents provenance is defined as information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.

Change history and amendment procedure

The review of this topic will be organised by  in consultation with the following volunteers: . They will partition the exploration and gathering of information and collaborate on the analysis and formulation of the initial report. Record details of the major steps in the change history table below.For further details of the complete procedure see item 4 on the Getting Started page.

Note: Do not record editorial / typographical changes. Only record significant changes of content.

Sources of information used

As this topic is intensively studied both from the research viewpoint and from the viewpoint of those deploying and using provenance in production contexts, there are a large number of relevant papers and reports, cited from the text and further identified in the Reference Section of the deliverable D5.1. The following urls identify other useful sources:

• https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview
• https://rd-alliance.org/groups/research-data-provenance.html
• https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/Krohnposter.pdf
• http://de.slideshare.net/drshorthair/om-alignment-with-ssn-prov-oboe-bfo
• http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/WebHome
• https://github.com/NCEAS/open-science-codefest/wiki/ProvenanceR
• https://www.dataone.org/webinars/provenance-and-dataone-facilitating-reproducible-science
• http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271449/1/opm.pdf
• http://d2i.indiana.edu/provenance
• https://kepler-project.org/users/add_on_modules/provenance
• http://www.taverna.org.uk/documentation/taverna-2-x/provenance/
• http://www.mygrid.org.uk/projects/semantic-provenance-project/
• https://www.eudat.eu/semantics
• http://sead-data.net/

Two-to-five year analysis

State of the art

Trends

Subsequent headings for each trend (if appropriate in this HL3 style)

Problems to be overcome

Sub-headings as appropriate in HL3 style (one per problem)

Details underpinning above analysis

Sketch of a longer-term horizon

Relationships with requirements and use cases

Summary of analysis highlighting implications and issues

Bibliography and references to sources