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To the provenance community,<br>
<br>
Natalia, Jan and myself are pleased to announce the availability of the<br>
following paper, which can be downloaded from
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21819/">http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21819/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
A formal account of the open provenance model.<br>
Natalia Kwasnikowska, Luc Moreau, and Jan Van den Bussche. <br>
<br>
<font size="-1">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.</font><br>
<br>
Best regards,<br>
Natalia, Jan and Luc<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science tel: +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton fax: +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk">l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk</a>
United Kingdom <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm">http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm</a>
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