A Logic Programming Approach to Scientific Workflow Provenance Querying

Scientific workflows have become increasingly important for enabling and accelerating many scientific discoveries. More and more scientists and researchers rely on workflow systems to integrate and structure various local and remote heterogeneous data and services to perform in silico experiments. In order to support understanding, validation, and reproduction of scientific results, provenance querying and management has become a critical component in scientific workflows. In this paper, we propose a logic programming approach to scientific workflow provenance querying and management with the following contributions: i) We identify a set of characteristics that are desirable for a scientific workflow provenance query language; ii) Based on these requirements, we propose FLOQ, a Frame Logic based query language for scientific workflow provenance, iii) We demonstrate that our previous relational database based provenance model, virtual data schema, can be easily mapped to the FLOQ model; and iv) We show by examples that FLOQ is expressive enough to formulate common provenance queries, including all the provenance challenge queries proposed in the provenance challenge series.