Open Provenance Model

Introduction

Thirteen teams responded to the second Provenance challenge. Discussions at the Monterey Workshop indicated that there was substantial agreement on a core representation of provenance. As a result, a small working group met, crafted and iterated a data model, which is available from here.

The starting point of this work is the community agreement summarized by Simon Miles (see SecondWorkshopMinutes). We assume that provenance of objects (whether digital or not) is represented by an annotated causality graph, which is a directed acyclic graph, enriched with annotations capturing further information pertaining to execution. For the purpose of this work, a provenance graph is defined to be a record of a past execution.

Inter-Operability Vision

Our aim is to define a data format and associated semantics by which provenance systems can interchange provenance information. Ultimately, this model may also be used to express provenance queries and to record provenance information. To achieve this ambitious goal, we would like to propose the following steps:

1. Community Review of the Open Provenance Model document
2. Revised version of the document
3. Definitions of bindings for specific technologies (e.g. XML and RDF)
4. Practical evaluation of the model in a Third Provenance Challenge (still to be defined)

Tentative Schedule

The following tentative schedule identifies key milestones that would need to be met in order to agree on a provenance data model, and to define a sensible inter-operability challenge to evaluate it (Provenance Challenge 3). It is proposed that we co-locate with IPAW'08 a one-day meeting that helps finalise some of these, face to face.

• Jan 1, 2008 - Feb 15, 2008: Community Review
• Feb 15, 2008 - March 31, 2008: Revised OPM specification
• Jan 1, 2008 - April 30, 2008: Definition of bindings
• May 1 2008 - June 15, 2008: Provenance Challenge 3 Definition
• June 19, 2008 (colocated with IPAW'08), Provenance Challenge 3 Preparation workshop, where teams finalise PC3 definition, and plan its organisation.

Review Process

The page OpenProvenanceModelReview is dedicated to the OPM review process.

-- LucMoreau - 18 Dec 2007
to top