Service Provenance in QoS-Aware Web Service Runtimes

In general, provenance of electronic data represents an important issue in information systems. So far, service-oriented computing research has mainly focused on provenance of data. However, service provenance also plays a central role since service providers and consumers want to be aware of the service's origin and history. In this paper, we present an approach for service provenance that builds on service metadata and various service runtime events. In addition, access control mechanisms are implemented to restrict access to this information. Besides being able to query and subscribe to provenance information, provenance graphs can be used to illustrate the history of services. We give some usage examples of service provenance and show how our approach was integrated into the VRESCo Web service runtime environment.