Call For Scenarios: The Fourth Provenance Challenge

Sorry for cross-posting:

Call For Scenarios: The Fourth and Last Provenance Challenge (PC4)

This is a call to the community for scenarios for the Fourth Provenance 
Challenge. This is to prepare for the PC4 scoping workshop to be held at 
IPAW'10. Scenarios are due May 15. If you have an interesting scenario 
for the community to work on together, this is a great opportunity to 
contribute.

- More information on PC4 can be found at 
http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/FourthProvenanceChallenge
- A scenario template and the submission page are at: 
http://twiki.ipaw.info/bin/view/Challenge/FourthProvenanceChallengeCFSP

Motivation for PC4:
The FirstProvenanceChallenge (PC1) was designed to compare 
expressiveness of provenance systems. It was followed by the 
SecondProvenanceChallenge (PC2) to exchange provenance information 
between systems. The consensus that followed led to a proposal for the 
Open Provenance Model (OPM), a data model for provenance. OPM was tested 
during the ThirdProvenanceChallenge (PC3). Following the success of this 
challenge, an open-source governance approach was adopted for OPM, which 
led to revision OPM v1.1.

Three considerations are motivating the launch of a novel challenge:
     * So far, the Provenance Challenge activity has had a strong focus 
on scientific workflows. While we certainly wish to keep the involvement 
of the scientific workflow community, we would like to demonstrate the 
broader applicability of provenance technology. For instance, it would 
be desirable to consider scenarios that involve users, where 
computations take place on the desktop and in the cloud, where various 
forms of artifacts are manipulated, e.g. data sets, files, documents, 
databases, and where artifacts are published and downloaded from the Web.

     * Furthermore, there is no point capturing provenance if we do not 
make use of it. It would therefore be desirable to make use of 
provenance, to demonstrate functionality that would have been impossible 
to implement without provenance.

     * Broader scenarios in which provenance is captured, and better 
exploitation of provenance to demonstrate functionality make use 
converge towards an end to end scenario, in which multiple technologies 
are involved, and really justifies the need for an interoperable solution.

Hence, the purpose of the Fourth and Last Provenance Challenge is to 
apply the Open Provenance Model to a broad end-to-end scenario, and 
demonstrate novel functionality that can only be achieved by the 
presence of an an interoperable solution for provenance. This challenge, 
the last one in this successful series, will be its natural conclusion 
since it will exploit OPM in an end-to-end scenario, following steps 
understanding provenance (PC1), posing the problem of provenance 
inter-operability (PC2), and testing the OPM solution (PC3).

Relationship to W3C Incubator on Provenance:
In parallel, we note the activities of the W3C Incubator on Provenance, 
which has collected use cases, derived requirements, and is in the 
process of beginning a technology roadmap. The Incubator and PC4 are 
complementary activities, which should cross-fertilize each other. 
Incubator's use cases and requirements can influence the PC4 scenario, 
whereas PC4 practical experience with OPM can inform the incubator.


Timetable:
April 15: call for scenario proposals
May 15: review of proposed scenarios and discussion
June 1: selection of a scenario
June 15: expressions of interest
June 17, 2010: scoping workshop co-located with IPAW'10 at Troy NY, USA. 
A goal of the scoping workshop is to the scope of PC4 and its dates.

Thanks for your contributions,
Paul Groth and Luc Moreau

Received on Tuesday, 13 April 2010 13:07:06 UTC