Published in
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Communications of the ACM, 4(51), p. 52-58, 2008
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Tools
The provenance of electronic data
,
Simon Miles ,
Javier Vazquez-Salceda,
John Ibbotson,
Sheng Jiang,
Steve Munroe,
Omer Farooq Rana,
Andreas Schreiber,
Victor Tan,
Laszlo Zsolt Varga
Full text: Download
Abstract
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 al- lows 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, com- posed 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 qual- ity 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 com- puter systems: documentation of execution and user-tailored provenance queries.