A Provenance Model of Composite Services in Service-Oriented Environments

Provenance awareness adds a new dimension to the engineering of service-oriented systems, requiring them to be able to answer questions about the provenance of any data produced. This need is even more evident where atomic services are aggregated into added-value composite services to be delivered with certain non-functional characteristics. Prior work in the area of provenance for service-oriented systems has primarily focused on the collection and storage infrastructure required for answering provenance questions. In contrast, in this paper we study the structure of the data thus collected considering the service's infrastructure as a whole and how this affects provenance collection for answering different types of provenance questions. In particular, we define an extension of W3Cs PROV ontological model with concepts that can be used to express the provenance of how services were discovered, selected, aggregated and executed. We demonstrate the conceptual adequacy of our model by reasoning over provenance instances for a composite service scenario.