The Foundations for Provenance on the Web

Abstract

Provenance, i.e., the origin or source of something, is becoming an important concern, since it offers the means to verify data products, to infer their quality, to analyse the processes that led to them, and to decide whether they can be trusted. For instance, provenance enables the reproducibility of scientific results; provenance is necessary to track attribution and credit in curated databases; and, it is essential for reasoners to make trust judgements about the information they use over the Semantic Web.As the Web allows information sharing, discovery, aggregation, filtering and flow in an unprecedented manner, it also becomes very difficult to identify, reliably, the original source that produced an information item on the Web. Since the emerging use of provenance in niche applications is undoubtedly demonstrating the benefits of provenance, we contend that provenance can and should reliably be tracked and exploited on the Web, and we survey the necessary foundations to achieve such a vision.Using multiple data sources, we have compiled the largest bibliographical database on provenance so far. This large corpus allows us to analyse emerging trends in the research community. Specifically, using the CiteSpace tool, we identify clusters of papers that constitute research fronts, from which we derive characteristics that we use to structure our foundational framework for provenance on the Web. We note that such an endeavour requires a multi-disciplinary approach, since it requires contributions from many computer science sub-disciplines, but also other non-technical fields given the human challenge that is anticipated.To develop our vision, it is necessary to provide a definition of provenance that applies to the Web context. Our conceptual definition of provenance is expressed in terms of processes, and is shown to generalise various definitions of provenance commonly encountered. Furthermore, by bringing realistic distributed systems assumptions, we refine our definition as a query over assertions made by processes.Given that the majority of work on provenance has been undertaken by the database, workflow and e-science communities, we review some of their work, contrasting approaches, and focusing on important topics we believe to be crucial for bringing provenance to the Web, such as abstraction, collections, storage, queries, workflow evolution, semantics and activities involving human interactions.However, provenance approaches developed in the context of databases and workflows essentially deal with closed systems. By that, we mean that workflow or database management systems are in full control of the data they manage, and track their provenance within their own scope, but not beyond. In the context of the Web, a broader approach is required by which chunks of provenance representation can be brought together to describe the provenance of information flowing across multiple systems. This is the specific purpose of the Open Provenance Vision, which is an approach that consists of controlled voc...

Looking Inside the Black-Box: Capturing Data Provenance Using Dynamic Instrumentation

“…For a comprehensive overview of the field, we refer the reader to Moreau [24]. Furthermore, Cheney et al [5] and Simmhan et al [30] provide specialized reviews for databases and e-science respectively.…”

A Formal Framework for Provenance Security

“…For part (5), if the output contains t with an atomic annotation x, we cannot determine whether t is present in R or S. Similarly, for part (6), if the output does not contain a tuple extending t, we cannot tell whether this is because t is not in R or because there is no matching tuple in S, because the result does not contain any annotations generated by t. 1) R does not obfuscate R(t) for any R(t).…”

“…For part (5), suppose that R ∪ S discloses R(t). Then we know that h(r(t)) ∨ h(s(t)) = h(r (t)) ∨ h(s (t)) implies r(t) = r (t), for any r, s, r , s providing values for R, S. Restricting attention to the Boolean values of t in r, s, r , s , we can see there are sixteen possibilities.…”

“…There exists a large literature on provenance, and we direct readers to recent surveys and summaries such as Moreau [5] and the W3C Provenance Incubator Group report [4] for an introduction to the area, and to our previous paper [6] for an overview of open semantics and security problems involving provenance.…”

“…A number of researchers and organizations, including the W3C, have suggested developing a provenance infrastructure or systems and standards that make it possible to determine the provenance of data on the Web [4], [5]. Further details and examples of provenance failures, and our views on the need for further research on these issues, are summarized in the paper [6].…”