Electronically Querying for the Provenance of Entities

The provenance of entities, whether electronic data or physical artefacts, is crucial information in practically all domains, including science, business and art. The increased use of software in automating activities provides the opportunity to add greatly to the amount we can know about an entity’s history and the process by which it came to be as it is. However, it also presents difficulties: querying for the provenance of an entity could potentially return detailed information stretching back to the beginning of time, and most of it irrelevant to the querier. In this paper, we define the concept of provenance query and describe techniques that allow us to perform scoped provenance queries.