Principles of Provenance Theme Proposal

Theme topic and brief description Recent research in a variety of settings (databases and data warehouses [10, 7, 20, 8], file systems [17], geographic information systems [6], scientific workflows and grid computation [19, 13], archiving and digital curation [1], and the Semantic Web [14]) has considered the problem of keeping track of metadata about creation and modification history, influences, ownership, and other provenance or lineage information. Such metadata is essential for making informed judgements about data quality, integrity, and authenticity. In addition, ideas about provenance are now being used in several other areas of computer science such as probabilistic databases [12], adaptive computation [4], security [15, 3] file synchronisation [11], and annotation propagation [5]. Other topics, such as version control and archiving, may also benefit from better understanding of provenance. We believe the time is ripe to develop the foundations of the topic and address questions such as: