Approaches for exploring and querying scientific workflow provenance graphs

Abstract

While many scientific workflow systems track and record data provenance, few tools have been developed that provide convenient and effective ways to access and explore this information. Two important ways for provenance information to be accessed and explored is through browsing (i.e., visualizing and navigating data and process dependencies) and querying (e.g., to select certain portions of provenance graphs or to determine if certain paths exist between items within a graph). We extend our prior work on representing and querying data provenance by showing how these can be effectively and efficiently combined into an interactive provenance browser. The browser allows different views of provenance to be explored and queried, where queries are expressed in a declarative graph-based provenance query language. Query results are expressed as provenance subgraphs, which can be further visualized and navigated through the browser. The browser supports a generic model of provenance that can be used with various workflow computation models, and has a direct translation to the Open Provenance Model. We present the provenance model, the query language, and describe the overall browser architecture and implementation. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.