Usage of `provenance’: A Tower of Babel Luc Moreau

The Provenance of this Talk Take all ipaw papers Over 1100 occurrences of `provenance’ Extract usage of the word ‘provenance’ 124 different usages

Something Provenance actor provenance data provenance disclosed provenance false provenance inform provenance infrastructure provenance input provenance interaction provenance logical provenance logical redo provenance process provenance observed provenance prospective provenance redo provenance retrospective provenance runtime provenance stream provenance stream-related provenance the provenance of interactions where provenance why provenance workflow provenance

Provenance Something provenance activities provenance aggregation provenance approaches provenance architectures provenance assertions provenance awareness provenance behavior provenance cache provenance can be employed provenance capabilities provenance catalogs provenance chains provenance client provenance collection provenance cross-runs provenance data provenance data retention provenance documents provenance entities provenance expressions provenance framework provenance generated in provenance graphs provenance history provenance information provenance instrumentation provenance is defined provenance is to be determined provenance levels provenance links provenance logs provenance tree provenance management provenance metadata provenance model provenance operations provenance portion of Quill++ provenance project provenance query provenance recorder provenance recording system provenance records provenance relation provenance relationships provenance repositories provenance representation provenance schema provenance security architecture provenance semantics provenance solutions provenance stack provenance system provenance techniques provenance traces provenance tracking provenance tracking model provenance trade-o provenance trail

Provenance of Something provenance of a single run provenance of annotations provenance of manual updates provenance of materials provenance of repeated runs of work

To do something with/on/for provenance To define provenance To determine provenance To capture provenance To collect provenance To chain provenance To integrate provenance To track provenance To verify provenance

Concept vs Representation Oxford English Dictionary: –the fact of coming from some particular source or quarter; origin, derivation –the history or pedigree of a work of art manuscript, rare book, etc.; –concretely, a record of the passage of an item through its various owners. We are interested in a representation of provenance in computer systems Wouldn’t it be useful to have a term to denote the representation so that we can distinguish it from the concept? Provenance log, provenance trail, provenance records, provenance information, provenance trails

`Provenance’ Pearls Actor Provenance is this the provenance of an actor? Provenance history: is this history of history? Data provenance data: an element of the representation of the provenance of a data item? Provenance metadata: metadata of some metadata? Provenance of interactions: the description of interactions or what caused an interaction to occur? We do provenance: are we making history?

Conclusions Do we really need 124 different usages of the word provenance? Do we need inconsistent terminology? We need a glossary