ProTracker: A provenance tracking system for scientific workflows

The provenance, which is used to understand the process by which a result was generated, is not only important but also necessary to science. It provides information that is the key to preserve the data, to determine the data's quality, and to reproduce as well as validate the results. Several workshops have been held on the topic, and it has been the focus of many research project and prototype system. In this paper, we design the ProTracker, which can be used to describe workflows, control the execution of workflows and capture provenance for heterogeneous scientific environments and also support both recording and querying of provenance. We have applied this system to our lab's large-scale network management platform and achieved positive results.