Provenance: Current directions and future challenges for service oriented computing

Modern organizations increasingly depend heavily on information stored and processed in distributed, heterogeneous data sources and services to make critical, high-value decisions. Service-oriented systems are dynamic in nature and are becoming ever more complex systems of systems. In such systems, knowing how data was derived is of significant importance in determining its validity and reliability. To address this, a number of advocates and theorists postulate that provenance is critical to building trust in data and the services that generated it as it provides evidence for data consumers to judge the integrity of the results. This paper provides an overview of provenance research with an emphasis on its application in the domain of service-oriented computing. The goal of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the provenance literature but rather to highlight key work, themes, challenges and issues as well as emerging areas related to the use of provenance as a mechanism for improving trust in data utilized in distributed computing environments.