Tracking provenance semantics in heterogeneous execution systems

Abstract

Digital artifacts result from complex, heterogeneous work processes involving content management, process execution, and curation. Accordingly, systems for tracking provenance of digital artifacts need to be able to integrate heterogeneous descriptions produced by loosely coupled or independent software components and work processes. In the approach described in this paper, two independently developed execution environments, D2K and Cyberintegrator, were instrumented by their developers to produce process and content descriptions in the form of resource description framework (RDF) statements. Using the open-source Kowari RDF database, these heterogeneous semantic descriptions were integrated to demonstrate the general applicability of RDF databases to answering provenance-related queries. The results suggest that the 'open-world' semantic model provided by RDF, and the powerful query languages provided by RDF databases, can be extended to integrate a wide variety of heterogeneous provenance-related information with minimal investment in new standard API's, metadata formats, and execution environments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.