Start Smart and Finish Wise: The Kiel Marine Science Provenance-Aware Data Management Approach

While creating or processing scientific data, it is very important to capture and to archive the corresponding provenance data. “Start smart and finish wise” is our approach for a provenance aware tooling, which helps data managers and scientists not only to manage their data, but also to capture their scientific data in the field, to record the provenance data, to store it for further analysis and finally to publish the scientific data to the data centres. The tool chain consists of four major components, (1) the digital Pen for capturing the (meta) data and the corresponding provenance information in the field, (2) the OCN database for data-acquisition workflows and the data repository, (3) the PubFlow framework for scientific data publication and (4) CAPS for capturing provenance data in Java based scientific software. During each processing step in “Start smart and finish wise” the provenance data for the scientific data is captured and archived.