[provenance-challenge] Re: A formal account of the open provenance model

[Joe Futrelle]

Thanks Luc, I will pass this along to my colleagues at the library school here at the U. of Illinois; they are particularly interested in formal models of provenance.

--
Joe Futrelle
Cyberenvironments and Technologies
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/futrelle

----- Original Message -----
> To the provenance community,
> 
> Natalia, Jan and myself are pleased to announce the availability of
> the
> following paper, which can be downloaded from
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21819/
> 
> 
> A formal account of the open provenance model.
> Natalia Kwasnikowska, Luc Moreau, and Jan Van den Bussche.
> 
> The Open Provenance Model (OPM) is a community data model for
> provenance that is designed to facilitate the meaningful interchange
> of provenance information between systems. Underpinning OPM, is a
> notion of directed graph, used to represent data products and
> processes in- volved in past computations, and dependencies between
> them; it is complemented by inference rules allowing new dependencies
> to be derived. The Open Provenance Model was designed from
> requirements captured in two `Provenance Challenges', and tested
> during the third: these challenges were international,
> multi-disciplinary activities aiming to exchange provenance
> information between multiple systems and query it. The design of OPM
> was mostly driven by practical and pragmatic considerations. The
> purpose of this paper is to formalize the theory underpinning this
> data model. Specifically, this paper proposes a temporal semantics for
> OPM graphs, defined in terms of a set of ordering constraints between
> time-points associated with OPM constructs. OPM inferences are
> characterized with respect to this temporal semantics, and a novel set
> of patterns is introduced to establish soundness and completeness
> properties. Building on this novel foundation, the paper proposes new
> definitions for graph algebraic operations, graph refinement and the
> notion of account, by which multiple descriptions of a same execution
> are allowed to co-exist in a same graph. Overall, this paper provides
> a strong theoretical underpinning to a data model being adopted by a
> community of users that help its disambiguation and promote
> inter-operability.
> 
> Best regards,
> Natalia, Jan and Luc
> 
> --
> Professor Luc Moreau
> Electronics and Computer Science tel: +44 23 8059 4487
> University of Southampton fax: +44 23 8059 2865
> Southampton SO17 1BJ email: l.moreau at ecs.soton.ac.uk United Kingdom
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm