Reconciling provenance policy conflicts by inventing anonymous nodes

Abstract

In scientific collaborations, provenance is increasingly used to understand, debug, and explain the processing history of data, and to determine the validity and quality of data products. While provenance is easily recorded by scientific workflow systems, it can be infeasible or undesirable to publish provenance details for all data products of a workflow run. We have developed ProPub, a system that allows users to publish a customized version of their data provenance, based on a set of publication and customization requests, while observing certain provenance publication policies, expressed as logic integrity constraints. When user requests conflict with provenance policies, repair actions become necessary. In prior work, we removed additional parts of the provenance graph (i.e., not directly requested by the user) to repair constraint violations. In this paper, we present an alternative approach, which ensures that all relevant nodes are retained in the provenance graph. The key idea is to introduce new anonymous nodes to represent lineage dependencies, without revealing information that the user wants to protect. With this new approach, a user may now explore different provenance publication strategies, and choose the most appropriate one before publishing sensitive provenance data. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.