Data lineage model for taverna workflows with lightweight annotation requirements

Abstract

The provenance, or lineage, of a workflow data product can be reconstructed by keeping a complete trace of workflow execution. This lineage information, however, is likely to be both imprecise, because of the black-box nature of the services that compose the workflow, and noisy, because of the many trivial data transformations that obscure the intended purpose of the workflow. In this paper we argue that these shortcomings can be alleviated by introducing a small set of optional lightweight annotations to the workflow, in a principled way. We begin by presenting a baseline, annotation-free lineage model for the Taverna workflow system, and then show how the proposed annotations improve the results of fundamental lineage queries.