Addressing the provenance challenge using ZOOM

Abstract

ZOOM*User Views presents a model of provenance for scientific workflows that is simple, generic, and yet sufficiently expressive to answer questions of data and step provenance that have been encountered in a large variety of scientific case studies. In addition, ZOOM builds on the concept of composite step-classes - or sub-workflows - which is present in many scientific workflow systems to develop a notion of user views. This paper discusses the design and implementation of ZOOM in the context of the queries posed by the provenance challenge, and shows how user views affect the level of granularity at which provenance information can be seen and reasoned about. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.