Provenance in Databases: Past, Current, and Future

The need to understand and manage provenance arises in almost every scientific application. In many cases, information about provenance constitutes the proof of correctness of results that are generated by scientific applications. It also determines the quality and amount of trust one places on the results. For these reasons, the knowledge of provenance of a scientific result is typically regarded to be as important as the result itself. In this paper, we provide an overview of research in provenance in databases and discuss some future research directions. The content of this paper is largely based on the tutorial presented at SIGMOD 2007 [11]. 1 Overview of Provenance The word provenance is used synonymously with the word lineage in the database community. It is also sometimes referred to as source attribution or source tagging. Provenance means origin or source. It also means the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature [26]. The knowledge of provenan...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: DEBU
• Authors: Wang Chiew Tan
• Keywords: DEBU 2007, Provenance, Scientific Applications, Word Provenance