Flexible Provenance Tracing

The description of the origins of a piece of data and the transformations by which it arrived in a database is termed the data provenance. The importance of data provenance has already been widely recognized in database community. The two major approaches to representing provenance information use annotations and inversion. While annotation is metadata pre-computed to include the derivation history of a data product, the inversion method finds the source data based on the situation that some derivation process can be inverted. Annotations are flexible to represent diverse provenance metadata but the complete provenance data may outsize data itself. Inversion method is concise by using a single inverse query or function but the provenance needs to be computed on-the-fly. This paper proposes a new provenance representation which is a hybrid of annotation and inversion methods in order to achieve combined advantage. This representation is adaptive to the storage constraint and the response time requirement of provenance inversion on-the-fly. Shazia Sadiq The University of Queensland, Australia