Provenance Analyzer: Exploring Provenance Semantics with Logic Rules

What exactly can we say about the dependency between artifact A and process P? Can we say that A was in fact generated by P, or was A generated by another process Q which used an artifact B that was generated by P? In fact, we cannot be sure. In particular, the given provenance information is insufficient to describe unambiguously in which order some basic OPM events (i.e., start of P, creation of A, end of P) occurred. The authors of [4] introduced precise edges (in addition to the default imprecise edges) to help narrow such ambiguities, provided a formal temporal OPM semantics via partial orders, and gave an efficient deductive procedure to compute all constraints implied by the axioms. Precise edges are labeled with a role, and represent a direct rather than transitive relationship, whereas an imprecise edge can represent a direct or a transitive relationship.