Towards Provenance Aware Design of Service Compositions: A Methodology for Analysing the Provenance Awareness in Service Designs

Specifying and analysing non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential for driving architectural decisions and validating composite service designs. Only where NFPs have been specified can we choose between services with similar functionality that would better satisfy our non-functional requirements. Meanwhile, incorporating provenance functionality into service-oriented systems' design is becoming crucial for users, allowing them to query the generation methods and origins of the data the system outputs. This need is particularly evident in compositions of services, where audits of individual services do not provide a connected picture of the composition's processing history. Making provenance awareness (ability to answer provenance queries) an explicit NFP in composite service specifications would enable composite service designers to analyse whether they meet provenance-related requirements. In this paper, we discuss a framework for designing and analysing provenance awareness for service compositions. We envision this as a basis for analysing the impact of provenance on other NFPs such as performance and storage.