Shrija Rajbhandari

Evaluating Provenance-based Trust for Scientific Workflows

Provenance is the documentation concerning the origin of a result generated by a process, and provides explanations about who, how, what resources were used in a process, and the processing steps that occurred to produce the result. Such provenance information is important to improve a scientist’s ability to judge and place certain amount of trust on the generated data. We illustrate how provenance information associated with a workflow can be used to evaluate trust. This work is based on several use cases from a Bio-Diversity application. We also propose a simple architecture to illustrate our trust framework.

Incorporating Provenance in Service Oriented Architecture

There is underlying need to support data provenance in a service-based computing environment such as grid where Web services may be automatically discovered, composed, and then consumed using innovative workflow management systems. In any scientific experiments, flow of data transformations occur producing data of added scientific value. Provenance is the documentation about such data generated by a process, providing explanations about who, how, what resources were used in the process along with the processing steps that occurred to produce that data. Such provenance information needs to be archived for the creator and the potential users to verify the data by possibly recreating and/or re-executing the process. It also improves a scientists ability to judge and have some reliability on the generated data so it can be used. In this paper, we present a provenance model that facilitates in capturing and recording of process provenance. We discuss the interactions between the components within our model focusing on provenance recording. A query component is also presented and discussed. This paper presents performance evaluations of our recording component with an example workflow scenario and show that the component is scalable

Navigating Provenance Information for Distributed Healthcare Management

Provenance information provides a useful basis to verify whether a particular application behavior has been adhered to. This is particularly useful to evaluate the basis for a particular outcome, as a result of a process, and to verify if the process involved in making the decision conforms to some pre-defined set of rules. This is significant in a healthcare scenario, where it is necessary to demonstrate that patient data has been processed in a particular way. Understanding how provenance information may be recorded, stored, and subsequently analyzed by a decision maker is therefore significant in a service oriented architecture, which involves the use of third party services over which the decision maker does not have control. The aggregation of data from multiple sources of patient information plays an important part in subsequent treatments that are proposed for a patient. A tool to navigate through and analyze such provenance information is proposed, based on the use of a portal framework that allows different views on provenance information to co-exist. The portal enables users to add custom portlets enabling application specific views that would facilitate particular decision making

Recording actor state in scientific workflows

The process which leads to a particular data item, or its provenance, may be documented in a number of ways. The recording of actor state assertions – essentially data that a client or service actor may assert about itself regarding an interaction, is evaluated as a critical provenance component within a service-oriented architecture. Actor state data can be combined with assertions of interaction to enable better reasoning within a provenance system. The types of data that may be recorded as actor state are subjective, and dependent on the nature of the application and the eventual use that is likely to be made of this data. A registry system that allows monitoring tools to be related to user needs is described with reference to an application scenario.

Automatic Assertion of Actor State in Service Oriented Architectures

Documentation of provenance, the process which was taken to create a particular data item, is critical within service oriented architectures where loose coupling between services and clients (actors) is employed. Such a process may involve interaction between multiple services, with each service being managed by a particular actor. The recording of actor state may provide critical contextual information regarding the state of a particular actor at a point during a client-service interaction, but is however typically left undocumented. We discuss the issues that are encountered with the automatic documentation of actor state and the types of resources which may be used to provide it. An architecture which allows monitoring tools to be related to user needs is presented and evaluated against a number of scenarios in a Web Services environment.