[provenance-challenge] Third Provenance Challenge - Call for Participation

[Paul Groth]

Please pass this on to those who might be interested - Paul Groth


The Third Provenance Challenge - Call for Participation

Data products are increasingly being produced by the composition of  
services and data supplied by multiple parties using a variety of data  
analysis, management, and collection technologies. This approach is  
particular evident in e-Science where scientists combine sensor data  
and shared Web-accessible databases using a variety of local and  
remote data analysis routines to produce experimental results. In such  
environments, provenance (also referred to as audit trail, lineage,  
and pedigree) plays a critical role as it enables users to understand,  
verify, reproduce, and ascertain the quality of data products.

Because of the importance of provenance, many areas have developed  
techniques and tools for determining provenance including scientific  
and business process workflow, visualization, digital libraries and  
semantic web technologies. An important challenge in the context of  
heterogenous compositional applications, is how to integrate the  
provenance produced by these techniques to be able to construct the  
full provenance of complex data products. To that end, the community  
has endeavored to develop a common understanding and model of  
provenance to aid interoperability through the Open Provenance Model  
(OPM).

Help chart the future of provenance interoperability by participating  
in the Third Provenance Challenge.

Details:

You can find information on the challenge definition at how to  
participate at the Third Provenance Challenge Wiki (http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/ThirdProvenanceChallenge 
).

To keep up-to-date, subscribe to the Provenance Challenge mailing list  
(see http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/WebHome).

Key Dates:

1. March 2 - The Third Provenance Challenge Starts
2. Make the workflow work with individual team's systems [Mar. 2 -  
Mar. 30]
3. Generate provenance for the challenge workflow & run queries on it  
[Mar. 30 - Apr. 13]
4. Export OPM Graphs and import from others [Apr. 13 - May. 4]
5. Run queries on imported OPM graph [Apr 27. - Jun. 1]
6. Prepare slides for challenge [Jun. 1 - Jun. 8]
7. PC3 Workshop June 10 - 11 held in Amsterdam.

Contact:

For details or questions, contact Paul Groth (pgroth at isi.edu).

Organizers:
Paul Groth, ISI / University of Southern California
Yogesh Simmhan, Microsoft Research
Luc Moreau, University of Southampton

Local Organizers:
Adam Belloum, University of Amsterdam
Zhiming Zhao, University of Amsterdam

History
Starting with the 2006 International Provenance and Annotation  
Workshop (IPAW), the community agreed to hold the First Provenance  
Challenge that emphasized understanding the commonalities and  
differences between existing approaches. Held in Washington DC on  
September 2006, the 17 team workshop identified several commonalities  
and resulted in agreement that a Second Provenance Challenge focusing  
on interoperability would be beneficial. At the Second Provenance  
Challenge workshop held at the High Performance Distributed Computing  
conference on June 26, 2007, teams presented their results  
demonstrating the ability to interoperate between several systems.  
Discussions at this challenge led to the specification of a common  
data model, The Open Provenance Model (OPM). This model was further  
discussed and developed at a subsequent workshop held at IPAW'08.  
Discussions at this workshop led to this Third Provenance Challenge  
focusing on interoperability using OPM. More information can be found  
at http://twiki.ipaw.info.