Provenance Capture and Use: A Practical Guide

There is a widespread recognition across MITRE’s sponsors of the importance of capturing the provenance of information (sometimes called lineage or pedigree). However, the technology for supporting capture and usage of provenance is relatively immature. While there has been much research, few commercial capabilities exist. In addition, there is neither a commonly understood concept of operations nor established best practices for how to capture and use provenance information in a consistent and principled way. This document captures lessons learned from the IM-PLUS project, which is prototyping a provenance capability that synthesizes prior research; the project is also applying the prototype to government application scenarios spanning defense, homeland security, and bio-surveillance. We describe desirable features of a provenance capability and trade-offs among alternate provenance approaches. The target audience is systems engineers and information architects advising our sponsors on how to improve their information management.