Provenance-based
reasoning in e-Science
Professor Luc Moreau
L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
University of Southampton
E-Science Applications
Provenance Definition

In the context e-Science, process matters to
end users:


The provenance of a piece of data is
the process that led to that piece of
data
Our aim is to conceive a computer-based
representation of provenance that allows us
to perform useful analysis and reasoning to
support our use cases
Beyond static and dynamic
validations

Static Validation



Operates on workflow source code
Workflow script may not be accessible or may be
expressed in a language not supported by analysis
tool
Dynamic Validation

Service based: interface matching, runtime type
checking, runtime constraint satisfaction
Looking at the Past

Provenance based reasoning



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Allows for validation of experiments after
execution
Third parties, such as reviewers and other
scientists, may want to verify that the results
obtained were computed correctly according to
some criteria.
These criteria may not be known when the
experiment was designed or run.
Important because science progresses (and
models evolve!)
Towards trusted systems
Now, your turn:

How can you apply your automated
reasoning methods to provenance
representation?