Requirements Capture

This page is intended for giving to users/developers of applications that are to be made provenance aware. It clarifies what requirements would be in scope for the provenance architecture and how we like those requirements to be presented when given to us.

Definition of Provenance

The provenance of a result is the process that produced that result. We provide mechanisms to document and query the provenance of data.

Types of Use Case Within Scope

We are interested in use cases for provenance documentation within a variety of applications. Below are generalised questions that have been taken from the use cases we have already collected, to clarify the scope of our work. These are the sort of queries we are able to answer with our framework.

• What are the details of the process that produced this result?
• Two processes, thought to be performing the same steps on the same inputs, have been run and produced different results. Was this because of a change in the inputs, the steps making up the process or the configuration of the process?
• Did the process that produced this result use the correct types of data at each stage?
• Did the process that produced this result follow the original plan?
• Did the process that produced this result meet with regulatory rules?
• What actions were this data used in performing and what actions were performed on this data?
• What were the settings/configuration of the services/tools/machines used in the process that produced this result?
• Where data is collated from multiple processes, what were the processes that fed into the process that produced this result?
• Which of these processes resulted in a satisfactory conclusion (by some criteria)?

Expressing Use Cases

We are looking for use cases of the form:

(1) Actor A does something, actor B does something else etc. (2) Actor C determines the answer to a question about the provenance of data (such as a specific example of one of those above).

Step (1) describes something that already happens in your application. Step (2) describes a specific provenance-related question that cannot be answered (easily) at the moment, but our functionality could help to achieve.

Below is a more specific example use case.

Several bioinformaticians perform experiments (workflows) using service X. Another bioinformatician, B, constructs a workflow that uses X. B estimates the duration that the experiment might take on the basis of the average time X has taken to complete its tasks before.

-- SimonMiles - 23 May 2005
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