Formalising a protocol for recording provenance in Grids

Both the scientific and business communities are beginning to rely on Grids as problemsolving mechanisms. These communities also have requirements in terms of provenance. Provenance is the documentation of process and the necessity for it is apparent in fields ranging from medicine to aerospace. To support provenance capture in Grids, we have developed an implementation-independent protocol for the recording of provenance. We describe the protocol in the context of a service-oriented architecture and formalise the entities involved using an abstract state machine or a three-dimensional state transition diagram. Using these techniques we sketch a liveness property for the system.