EU PROVENANCE project: an open provenance architecture for distributed applications

The concept of provenance is already well understood in the study of fine art where it refers to the trusted, documented history of some work of art. Given that documented history, the object attains an authority that allows scholars to understand and appreciate its importance and context relative to other works of art. This same concept of provenance may also be applied to data and information generated within a computer system; particularly when the information is subject to regulatory control over an extended period of time. Today’s distributed architectures (not only Agent technologies, but also Web Services’ and GRID architectures) suffer from limitations, such as lack of mechanisms to trace results. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual and aggregated services that produced a particular output. In this chapter we present the main results of the EU PROVENANCE project and how these can be valuable in agent-mediated healthcare applications. For the latter we describe the Organ Transplant Management Application (OTMA), one of the demonstrator applications developed.