Knowledge Provenance in Virtual Observatories: Application to Image Data Pipelines

Scientific data services are increasing in usage and scope, and with these increases comes growing need for access to provenance information. Our goal is to design and implement an extensible provenance solution that is deployed at the science data ingest time. In this paper, we describe our work in the setting of a particular set of data services in the area of solar coronal physics. The paper focuses on one existing federated data service and one proposed observatory. Our claim is both that the design and implementation are useful for the particular scientific image data services we designed for, but further that the design provides an operational specification for other scientific data applications. We highlight the need for and usage of semantic technologies and tools in our design and implemented service.