1. Provenance: Problem, Architectural issues, Towards Trust
Luc Moreau
University of Southampton

2. Contents A definition of provenance Example 1: Aerospace engineering
Example 2: Organ transplant management
Example 3: Bioinformatics grid
Provenance architecture
Towards Trust
Conclusion

3. The Grid and Virtual Organisations
The Grid problem is defined as coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organisations [FKT01].
Effort is required to allow users to place their trust in the data produced by such virtual organisations
Understanding how a given service is likely to modify data flowing into it, and how this data has been generated is crucial.

4. Provenance and Virtual Organisations
Given a set of services in an open grid environment that decide to form a virtual organisation with the aim to produce a given result;
How can we determine the process that generated the result, especially after the virtual organisation has been disbanded?
The lack of information about the origin of results does not help users to trust such open environments.

5. Provenance and Workflows
Workflow enactment has become popular in the Grid and Web Services communities
Workflow enactment can be seen as a scripted form of virtual organisation.
The problem is similar: how can we determine the origin of enactment results.

6. Provenance: Definition
Provenance is an annotation able to explain how a particular result has been derived.
In a service-oriented architecture, provenance identifies what data is passed between services, what services are available, and what results are generated for particular sets of input values, etc.
Using provenance, a user can trace the “process” that led to the aggregation of services producing a particular output.

7. Provenance in Aerospace Engineering
Provenance requirement: to maintain a historical record of outputs from each sub-system involved in simulations.
Aircrafts’ provenance data need to be kept for up to 99 years when sold to some countries.
Currently, little direct support is available for this.

8. Provenance in Organ Transplant Management
Decision support systems for organ and tissue transplant, rely on a wide range of data sources, patient data, and doctors’ and surgeons’ knowledge
Heavily regulated domain: European, national, regional and site specific rules govern how decisions are made.
Application of these rules must be ensured, be auditable and may change over time
Provenance allows tracking previous decisions, which is crucial in maximising the efficiency in matching and recovery rate of patients
Tracking back previous decisions in any one centre to identify whether the best match was made, who was involved in the decision, what was the context.

9. Provenance in a Bioinformatics Grid (myGrid)
myGrid builds a personalised problem-solving environment that helps bioinformaticians find, adapt, construct and execute in silico experiments
Keep the scientist informed as to the provenance of data relevant to their experiment space
Provenance in Drugs Discovery process:
FDA requirement on drug companies to keep a
record of provenance of drug discovery as long
as the drug is in use (up to 50 years sometimes).

10. What is the problem?
Provenance recording should be part of the infrastructure, so that users can elect to enable it when they execute their complex tasks over the Grid or in Web Services environments.
Currently, the Web Services protocol stack and the Open Grid Services Architecture do not provide any support for recording provenance.

11. Architectural Vision

12. Architectural Vision
Provenance gathering is a collaborative process that involves multiple entities, including the workflow enactment engine, the enactment engine's client, the service directory, and the invoked services.
Provenance data will be submitted to one or more “provenance repositories” acting as storage for provenance data.
Upon user's requests, some analysis, navigation and reasoning over provenance data can be undertaken.

13. Architectural Vision
Storage could be achieved by a provenance service.
Provenance service would provide support for analysis, navigation or reasoning over provenance
Client side support for submitting provenance data to the provenance service.

14. A First Prototype (Szomszor,Moreau 03)
A service-oriented architecture for provenance support in Grid and Web Services environments, based on the idea of a provenance service;
A client-side API for recording provenance data for Web Service invocation;
A data model for storing provenance data;
A server-side interface for querying provenance data;
Two components making use of provenance: provenance browsing and provenance validation.

15. Prototype Overview

16. Prototype Sequence Diagram

17. Prototype Provenance Data Model

18. Prototype Provenance Browser

19. Discussion
In order for provenance data to be useful, we expect such a protocol to support some “classical” properties of distributed algorithms.
Using mutual authentication, an invoked service can ensure that it submits data to a specific provenance server, and vice-versa, a provenance server can ensure that it receives data from a given service.
With non-repudiation, we can retain evidence of the fact that a service has committed to executing a particular invocation and has produced a given result.
We anticipate that cryptographic techniques will be useful to ensure such properties

20. Towards Trust

21. Towards Trust
Using the provenance of data, trust metrics of the data can be derived from:
Trust the user places in invoked services
Trust the user places in the input data
Trust the user places in the enacted workflow
Trust the user places in the provenance service.

22. The purpose of project PASOA to investigate provenance in Grid architectures
Funded by EPSRC under the “fundamental computer science for e-Science call”
In collaboration with Cardiff

23. Conclusion Provenance is a rather unexplored domain
Strategic to bring trust in open environment
Necessity to design a configurable architecture capable of support multiple requirements from very different application domains.
Need to further investigate the algorithmic foundations of provenance, which will lead to scalable and secure industrial solutions.

24. Publications
[SM03] Martin Szomszor and Luc Moreau. Recording and reasoning over data provenance in web and grid services. In International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE'03), volume 2888 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages , Catania, Sicily, Italy, November 2003.
[MCS+03] Luc Moreau, Syd Chapman, Andreas Schreiber, Rolf Hempel, Omer Rana, Lazslo Varga, Ulises Cortes, and Steven Willmott. Provenance-based trust for grid computing - position paper

25. Acknowledgements Martin Szomzor, Southampton Syd Chapman, IBM
Omer Rana, Cardiff
Andreas Schreiber and Rolf Hempel, DLR
Lazslo Varga, SZTAKI
Ulises Cortes and Steven Willmott, UPC
Mark Greenwood, Carole Goble, Manchester