Provenance Challenge Wiki
Provenance is a critical concept in scientific workflows, since it allows scientists to understand the origin of their results, to repeat their experiments, and to validate the processes that were used to derive data products. During a discussion on provenance
standardization at the International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW'06, www.ipaw.info), the community decided that it needs to understand the different representations used for provenance, its common aspects, and the reasons for its differences. As a result, the community agreed that a "Provenance Challenge" should be set to compare and understand existing approaches.
The
First Provenance Challenge (details
here and teams' results available from
here) commenced 2006-June-19 and concluded in a workshop held on 2006-September-13 in Washington, DC. There was a total of 17 teams, contributing a diverse range of results. As part of the discussion at that workshop, it was decided to hold a second challenge, for which the focus would be interoperability between systems.
The
second provenance challenge commenced on 2006-December-12 and concluded on 2007-June-26 with a day-long workshop at
High Performance Distributed Computing in Monterey, California, where teams presented and discussed the results. Please see
the specification of the challenge,
the agenda (including teams' presentations) and
a summary of the technical points raised in discussion. The result data from all teams are available
from the team pages.
The
second provenance challenge resulted in discussions where a consensus about a common data model began to emerge. This consensus, summarised at
SecondWorkshopMinutes, has led to a proposed specification of a provenance data model and inference rules,
the Open Provenance Model:
OPM. A review period of this model is commencing in January 2008, with hope to agree on a data model and evaluate it a Third Provenance Challenge. Comments about the feedback can be found at
OpenProvenanceModelReview.
The
OpenProvenanceModelWorkshop will take place on Thursday 19th, just after IPAW, at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
Mailing list
A mailing list for challenge related issues has been set up. An archive is available from
http://www.ipaw.info/mail/archive.php/. In order to subscribe please send
Once subscribed messages can be sent to
provenance-challenge@ipaw.info .
For information,
other challenges have been previously set in other areas of computer science.
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