A mediator-based system for distributed semantic provenance management systems

Abstract

Today, most of the applications exchanging and processing documents on the web or in clouds become provenance aware and provides heterogeneous, decentralized and not interoperable provenance data. Provenance is becoming a key metadata for assessing electronic documents trustworthiness and should be considered as first class data. Most of provenance management systems are either dedicated to a specific application (workflow, database) or a specific data type. Moreover, in modern infrastructures such as cloud, applications can be deployed and are executed on several provider infrastructure. So, there is a need to track the provenance of applications between different provenance providers. For these reasons, modeling, collecting and querying provenance across heterogeneous distributed sources is considered as a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce a framework based on semantic web models supporting syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of provenance sources and correlations between multiple sources. This framework is implemented as a provenance management system (or PMS). We focus on the design of a mediator based system allowing to federate distributed PMSs and we present optimization issues related to distributed query processing.