Application of provenance for automated and research driven workflows

Abstract

Provenance has recently become a popular topic for workflow execution environments but it is also relevant to other applications, such as longrunning, user-driven "research workflows", problem solving environments, and data streaming (data analysis) environments. This paper presents a number of use cases where provenance can play an important role in understanding how data was derived, how decisions were made, and enable sharing of data from a variety of sources. We break down the requirements elucidated by our use cases and discuss our experiences in applying an existing provenance system to these use cases.