On data provenance in group-centric secure collaboration

Abstract

In this paper, we explore data provenance in a group-centric secure collaboration environment. In collaborations, participating organizations are likely to want certain trustworthiness on the data that are shared from other organizations and some assurance on how the shared data are used by users regardless of their organizations. By utilizing data provenance in group collaboration environment, we can provide the participating organizations with various provenance information that can establish trustworthiness and assurance on the shared data. To achieve this, we first identify what kind of operation information can be and should be captured as provenance data and how this information can be expressed in a formal representation which can be queried via the provenance system for certain utilities. We show the identified provenance data for a group collaboration application can provide some unique provenance utilities such as ability to trace the origins or usages of a shared data object even if it was created in a different organization. We utilize Open Provenance Model (OPM) [13] to capture various group collaboration operations identified in [12] and introduce a provenance system for a group collaboration environment that utilizes Resource Description Framework (RDF) data representations [10] and GLEEN-enabled SPARQL query language [7]. © 2011 ICST.