Application of named graphs towards custom provenance views

Abstract

Provenance capture as applied to execution oriented and interactive workflows is designed to record minute detail needed to support a "modify and restart " paradigm as well as re-execution of past workflows. In our experience, provenance also plays an important role in human-centered verification, results tracking, and knowledge sharing. However, the amount of information recorded by provenance capture mechanisms generally obfuscates the conceptual view of events. There is a need for a flexible means to create and dynamically control user oriented views over the detailed provenance record. In this paper, we present a design which leverages named graphs and extensions to the SPARQL query language to create and manage views as a server-side function, simplifying user presentation of provenance data. 1.