[provenance-challenge] Re: Call For Scenarios: The Fourth Provenance Challenge

[Yogesh Simmhan]

It might be useful to consider some of the use cases evolving as part of the W3C Provenance Incubator group as a starting point for PC4. Several of the PC3/OPM participants are in the W3C group.

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/User_Requirements

Best,
--Yogesh

| -----Original Message-----
| From: provenance-challenge-ipaw-info-bounces at ipaw.info
| [mailto:provenance-challenge-ipaw-info-bounces at ipaw.info] On Behalf Of
| Paul Groth
| Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 6:03 AM
| To: provenance-challenge at ipaw.info; public-xg-prov at w3.org
| Subject: [provenance-challenge] Call For Scenarios: The Fourth
| Provenance Challenge
| 
| Sorry for cross-posting:
| 
| Call For Scenarios: The Fourth and Last Provenance Challenge (PC4)
| 
| This is a call to the community for scenarios for the Fourth Provenance
| Challenge. This is to prepare for the PC4 scoping workshop to be held
| at IPAW'10. Scenarios are due May 15. If you have an interesting
| scenario for the community to work on together, this is a great
| opportunity to contribute.
| 
| - More information on PC4 can be found at
| http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/FourthProvenanceChallenge
| - A scenario template and the submission page are at:
| http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/FourthProvenanceChallengeCFSP
| 
| Motivation for PC4:
| The FirstProvenanceChallenge (PC1) was designed to compare
| expressiveness of provenance systems. It was followed by the
| SecondProvenanceChallenge (PC2) to exchange provenance information
| between systems. The consensus that followed led to a proposal for the
| Open Provenance Model (OPM), a data model for provenance. OPM was
| tested during the ThirdProvenanceChallenge (PC3). Following the success
| of this challenge, an open-source governance approach was adopted for
| OPM, which led to revision OPM v1.1.
| 
| Three considerations are motivating the launch of a novel challenge:
|      * So far, the Provenance Challenge activity has had a strong focus
| on scientific workflows. While we certainly wish to keep the
| involvement of the scientific workflow community, we would like to
| demonstrate the broader applicability of provenance technology. For
| instance, it would be desirable to consider scenarios that involve
| users, where computations take place on the desktop and in the cloud,
| where various forms of artifacts are manipulated, e.g. data sets, files,
| documents, databases, and where artifacts are published and downloaded
| from the Web.
| 
|      * Furthermore, there is no point capturing provenance if we do not
| make use of it. It would therefore be desirable to make use of
| provenance, to demonstrate functionality that would have been
| impossible to implement without provenance.
| 
|      * Broader scenarios in which provenance is captured, and better
| exploitation of provenance to demonstrate functionality make use
| converge towards an end to end scenario, in which multiple technologies
| are involved, and really justifies the need for an interoperable
| solution.
| 
| Hence, the purpose of the Fourth and Last Provenance Challenge is to
| apply the Open Provenance Model to a broad end-to-end scenario, and
| demonstrate novel functionality that can only be achieved by the
| presence of an an interoperable solution for provenance. This challenge,
| the last one in this successful series, will be its natural conclusion
| since it will exploit OPM in an end-to-end scenario, following steps
| understanding provenance (PC1), posing the problem of provenance inter-
| operability (PC2), and testing the OPM solution (PC3).
| 
| Relationship to W3C Incubator on Provenance:
| In parallel, we note the activities of the W3C Incubator on Provenance,
| which has collected use cases, derived requirements, and is in the
| process of beginning a technology roadmap. The Incubator and PC4 are
| complementary activities, which should cross-fertilize each other.
| Incubator's use cases and requirements can influence the PC4 scenario,
| whereas PC4 practical experience with OPM can inform the incubator.
| 
| 
| Timetable:
| April 15: call for scenario proposals
| May 15: review of proposed scenarios and discussion June 1: selection
| of a scenario June 15: expressions of interest June 17, 2010: scoping
| workshop co-located with IPAW'10 at Troy NY, USA.
| A goal of the scoping workshop is to the scope of PC4 and its dates.
| 
| Thanks for your contributions,
| Paul Groth and Luc Moreau
|