PLUS: Provenance for Life, the Universe and Stuff

In this demonstration, we exhibit a new type of provenance system, one that is not tied to any particular domain, closed-world system or use. The PLUS provenance system was inspired by government requirements to enable provenance capture, storage and use across multi-organizational systems. PLUS is general enough to interact across open-world distributed systems, often without administrative access to those underlying distributed systems. It captures and stores provenance, permits user annotations, and provides tools for analyzing the provenance on the basis of those annotations. Due to the need to share provenance across many organizations, much attention has been paid to provenance access and security. We highlight all of these features via a demonstration using an Emergency Preparedness and Response (EP&R) scenario.