Provenance Explorer - Customized Provenance Views Using Semantic Inferencing

This paper presents Provenance Explorer, a secure provenance visualization tool, designed to dynamically generate customized views of scientific data provenance that depend on the viewer’s requirements and/or access privileges. Using RDF and graph visualizations, it enables scientists to view the data, states and events associated with a scientific workflow in order to understand the scientific methodology and validate the results. Initially the Provenance Explorer presents a simple, coarse-grained view of the scientific process or experiment. However the GUI allows permitted users to expand links between nodes (input states, events and output states) to reveal more fine-grained information about particular sub-events and their inputs and outputs. Access control is implemented using Shibboleth to identify and authenticate users and XACML to define access control policies. The system also provides a platform for publishing scientific results. It enables users to select particular nodes within the visualized workflow and drag-and-drop them into an RDF package for publication or e-learning. The direct relationships between the individual components selected for such packages are inferred by the rule-inference engine.

[1]  J. Carroll,et al.  Jena: implementing the semantic web recommendations , 2004, WWW Alt. '04.

[2]  Matthew R. Pocock,et al.  Taverna: a tool for the composition and enactment of bioinformatics workflows , 2004, Bioinform..

[3]  H. Lan,et al.  SWRL : A semantic Web rule language combining OWL and ruleML , 2004 .

[4]  Robert Stevens,et al.  myTea: Connecting the Web to Digital Science on the Desktop , 2005 .

[5]  Simon Miles.  Electronically Querying for the Provenance of Entities , 2006, IPAW.

[6]  Ian Horrocks,et al.  Ontologies and the semantic web , 2008, CACM.

[7]  Nicola Guarino,et al.  Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE , 2002, EKAW.

[8]  Ian J. Taylor,et al.  Triana: a graphical Web service composition and execution toolkit , 2004, Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on Web Services, 2004..

[9]  Jane Hunter,et al.  Generating eScience Workflows from Statistical Analysis of Prior Data , 2005 .

[10]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  Applying KAoS Services to Ensure Policy Compliance for Semantic Web Services Workflow Composition and Enactment , 2004, SEMWEB.

[11]  Ilkay Altintas,et al.  Provenance Collection Support in the Kepler Scientific Workflow System , 2006, IPAW.

[12]  Benjamin Kuipers,et al.  Algernon—a tractable system for knowledge-representation , 1991, SGAR.

[13]  Cláudio T. Silva,et al.  Managing Rapidly-Evolving Scientific Workflows , 2006, IPAW.

[14]  James Frew,et al.  Composing lineage metadata with XML for custom satellite-derived data products , 2004, Proceedings. 16th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, 2004..

[15]  Jane Hunter,et al.  The ABC Ontology and Model , 2001, J. Digit. Inf..

[16]  Ron Weber,et al.  Ontological foundations of information systems , 1997 .

[17]  Karen Schuchardt,et al.  Multi-scale Science: Supporting Emerging Practice with Semantically Derived Provenance , 2003 .

[18]  Monica M. C. Schraefel,et al.  Breaking the book: translating the chemistry lab book into a pervasive computing lab environment , 2004, CHI.

[19]  Dennis G. Kafura,et al.  First experiences using XACML for access control in distributed systems , 2003, XMLSEC '03.

[20]  Jane Hunter,et al.  Realizing the hydrogen economy through Semantic Web technologies , 2004, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[21]  Ken Klingenstein,et al.  Federated Security: The Shibboleth Approach , 2004 .

[22]  Robert M. Colomb,et al.  Formal Versus Material Ontologies for Information Systems Interoperation in the Semantic Web , 2002, Comput. J..

[23]  Carole A. Goble,et al.  Using Semantic Web Technologies for Representing E-science Provenance , 2004, SEMWEB.

[24]  Craig E. Wills,et al.  Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers & posters , 2004 .