Capturing Provenance in the Wild

All current provenance systems are “closed world” systems; provenance is collected within the confines of a well understood, pre-planned system. However, when users compose services from heterogeneous systems and organizations to form a new application, it is impossible to track the provenance in the new system using currently available work. In this work, we describe the ability to compose multiple provenance-unaware services in an “open world” system and still collect provenance information about their execution. Our approach is implemented using the PLUS provenance system and the open source MULE Enterprise Service Bus. Our evaluations show that this approach is scalable and has minimal overhead.