Trust Assessment Using Provenance In Service Oriented Applications (original) (raw)

Establishing workflow trust using provenance information

2006

Abstract. Workflow forms a key part of many existing Service Oriented applications, involving the integration of services that may be made available at distributed sites. It is possible to distinguish between an “abstract” workflow description outlining which services must be involved in a workflow execution and a “physical” workflow description outlining the instances of services that were used in a particular enactment.

Establishing Work∞ow Trust Using Provenance Information

Workflow forms a key part of many existing Service Oriented applications, involving the integration of services that may be made available at distributed sites. It is possible to distinguish between an "abstract" workflow description outlining which services must be involved in a workflow execution and a "physical" workflow description outlining the instances of services that were used in a particular enactment. Provenance information provides a useful way to capture the physical workflow description automatically -especially if this information is captured in a standard format. Subsequent analysis on this provenance information may be used to evaluate whether the abstract workflow description has been adhered to, and to enable a user executing a workflow-based application to establish "trust" in the outcome. An analysis tool that makes use of provenance information to assist in evaluating trust in the outcome of a workflow execution is presented. The analysis tool makes use of a rule-based engine, supporting a range of queries on the recorded information by one or more workflow enactors. The results of the analysis tool on a particular workflow scenario are presented, along with an experiment demonstrating how the analysis tool would scale as the granularity of the recorded provenance information was increased.

A workflow modeling system for capturing data provenance

Computers & Chemical Engineering, 2014

A workflow is an abstraction of the steps associated with the underlying work process and is typically modeled as a directed graph. The workflow concept under its various manifestations has been used to model applications in diverse areas, including project planning, manufacturing, scientific experiments, execution of computer software, and publishing. While the Open Provenance Model Core Specification had laid the foundation for defining the key concepts in a workflow, a simplified high level graphical representation of a workflow that is widely applicable is not available. In this paper we describe a novel general framework for building workflows and implementing the associated actions, which will facilitate understanding of work processes across multiple disciplines. As such, most work processes are organized hierarchically with well defined control and management responsibilities. This framework will facilitate integration and coordination of activities across associated domains. Additionally, it will act as a template to refer to the associated metadata as well as reference to access the instance data from archives of completed workflow cases. When a specific case is in progress, a finite state machine will guide the user through the steps and provide up to date information about the current state. We describe the main building blocks in the framework, their functionalities and illustrate the integration of workflows between an experimental and a scientific process. (G.S. Joglekar). force searches highly inefficient and time consuming. The current solution for such situations is to write custom computer software for every special requirement linking multiple information repositories with disparate data identifiers and creating specific search protocols to mine for data related to the issue at hand. Similarly, there are software companies that specialize in annotating information and reports that were created using word processors or spreadsheets, using natural language processing techniques. Therefore, moving forward, in order to avoid such case-by-case solutions, it is important insure that all information is captured in a semantically rich format.

A multi-functional architecture addressing workflow and service challenges using provenance data

2010

In service-oriented environments, keeping track of the composition process along with the data transformations and services provides a rich amount of information for later reasoning. Current exploitation and application of this information, which is referred to as provenance data, is very limited as provenance systems started being developed for specific applications. Therefore, there is a need for a multi-functional architecture, which would be application-independent and could be deployed in any area. In this paper, we present an architecture, which exploits provenance information to target the current challenges of workflows. These challenges include workflow composition, abstract workflow selection, refinement, evaluation, and graph model extraction.

A history-tracing XML-based provenance framework for workflows

The 5th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, 2010

The importance of validating and reproducing the outcome of computational processes is fundamental to many application domains. Assuring the provenance of workflows will likely become even more important with respect to the incorporation of human tasks to standard workflows by emerging standards such as WS-HumanTask. This paper addresses this trend by an actor-based workflow approach that actively support provenance. It proposes a framework to track and store provenance information automatically that applies for various workflow management systems. In particular, the introduced provenance framework supports the documentation of workflows in a legally binding way. The authors therefore use the concept of layered XML documents, i.e. history-tracing XML. Furthermore, the proposed provenance framework enables the executors (actors) of a particular workflow task to attest their operations and the associated results by integrating digital XML signatures.

A graph model of data and workflow provenance

2010

Provenance has been studied extensively in both database and workflow management systems, so far with little convergence of definitions or models. Provenance in databases has generally been defined for relational or complex object data, by propagating fine-grained annotations or algebraic expressions from the input to the output. This kind of provenance has been found useful in other areas of computer science: annotation databases, probabilistic databases, schema and data integration, etc. In contrast, workflow provenance aims to capture a complete description of evaluation-or enactment-of a workflow, and this is crucial to verification in scientific computation. Workflows and their provenance are often presented using graphical notation, making them easy to visualize but complicating the formal semantics that relates their run-time behavior with their provenance records. We bridge this gap by extending a previously-developed dataflow language which supports both database-style querying and workflow-style batch processing steps to produce a workflow-style provenance graph that can be explicitly queried. We define and describe the model through examples, present queries that extract other forms of provenance, and give an executable definition of the graph semantics of dataflow expressions.

Towards a Taxonomy of Provenance in Scientific Workflow Management Systems

2009

Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) have been helping scientists to prototype and execute in silico experiments. They can systematically collect provenance information for the derived data products to be later queried. Despite the efforts on building a standard Open Provenance Model (OPM), provenance is tightly coupled to SWfMS. Thus scientific workflow provenance concepts, representation and mechanisms are very heterogeneous, difficult to integrate and dependent on the SWfMS. To help comparing, integrating and analyzing scientific workflow provenance, this paper presents a taxonomy about provenance characteristics. Its classification enables computer scientists to distinguish between different perspectives of provenance and guide to a better understanding of provenance data in general. The analysis of existing approaches will assist us in managing provenance data from distributed heterogeneous workflow executions.

Linked provenance data: A semantic Web-based approach to interoperable workflow traces

2011

The Third Provenance Challenge (PC3) offered an opportunity for provenance researchers to evaluate the interoperability of leading provenance models with special emphasis on importing and querying workflow traces generated by others. We investigated interoperability issues related to reusing Open Provenance Model (OPM)-based workflow traces.