As many domains employ ever more complex systems-of-systems, capturing provenance among component systems is increasingly important. Applications such as intrusion detection, load balancing, traffic routing, and insider threat detection all involve monitoring and analyzing the data provenance. Implicit in these applications is the assumption that “good” provenance is captured (e.g. complete pro...

Provenance information records the source and ownership history of an object. We study the problem of provenance tracking in concurrent programs, in which several principals execute concurrent processes and exchange messages over unbounded but unordered channels. The provenance of a message, roughly, is a function of the sequence of principals that have transmitted the message in the past. The ...

Provenance for positive queries is well understood and elegantly handled by provenance semirings [GKT07], which subsume many earlier approaches. However, the semiring approach does not extend easily to why-not provenance or, more generally, first-order queries with negation. An alternative approach is to view query evaluation as a game between two players who argue whether, for given database I...

ProvStore is the first online public provenance repository supporting the new PROV standards by W3C. It allows users and applications to store and (optionally) publish the provenance of their data on the Web. Provenance documents can be transformed, visualized, and shared in various serializations, with all the functionality also available to automated applications via a RESTful API (OAuth supp...

Using pervasive provenance to secure mainstream systems has recently attracted interest from industry and government. Recording, storing and managing all of the provenance associated with a system is a considerable challenge. Analyzing the resulting noisy, heterogeneous, continuously-growing provenance graph adds to this challenge, and apparently necessitates segmentation, that is, approximatin...

We investigate the main limitations imposed by existing provenance systems in the development of provenanceaware applications. In the case of disclosed provenance APIs, most of those limitations can be traced back to the inability to integrate provenance from different sources, layers and of different granularities into a coherent view of data production. We consider possible solutions in the d...

All current provenance systems are “closed world” systems; provenance is collected within the confines of a well understood, pre-planned system. However, when users compose services from heterogeneous systems and organizations to form a new application, it is impossible to track the provenance in the new system using currently available work. In this work, we describe the ability to compose mul...

The provenance community has built a number of systems to collect provenance, most of which assume that provenance will be retained indefinitely. However, it is not cost-effective to retain provenance information inefficiently. Since provenance can be viewed as a graph, we note the similarities to web graphs and draw upon techniques from the web compression domain to provide our own novel and i...

The automated tracking and storage of provenance information promises to be a major advantage of scientific workflow systems. We discuss issues related to data and workflow provenance, and present techniques for focusing user attention on meaningful provenance through “user views,” for managing the provenance of nested scientific data, and for using information about the evolution of a workflow...

Understanding how a piece of data was produced, where it was stored, and by whom it was accessed, is crucial information in many processes. To understand the trace of data, the provenance of that data can be recorded and analyzed. But it is sometimes hard to understand this provenance information, especially for people who are not familiar with software or computer science. To close this gap, w...