On the Use of Semantic Annotations for Supporting Provenance in Grids

There has seen a strong demand for provenance in grid applications, which enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the resources, configurations and execution settings. In this paper we analyses the requirements of provenance support and discusses the nature and characteristics of provenance data on the Grid. We define a new conception called augmented provenance that enhances conventional provenance data with extensive metadata and semantics. A hybrid approach is proposed for the creation and management of augmented provenance in which semantic annotation is used to generate semantic provenance data and the database management system is used for execution data management. The approach has been applied to a real world application, and tools and GUIs are developed to facilitate provenance management and exploitation.