Recording Process Documentation in the Presence of Failures

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Description/Abstract

Scientific and business communities present unprecedented requirements on provenance, where the provenance of some data item is the process that led to that data item. Previous work has conceived a computer-based representation of past executions for determining provenance, termed process documentation, and has developed a protocol, PReP, to record process documentation in service oriented architectures. However, PReP assumes a failure free environment. Failures lead to process documentation unable to be recorded, losing the evidence that a process occurred. This is not acceptable in the applications relying on process documentation and would cause disastrous consequences. This paper describes our solution, F-PReP, a protocol for recording process documentation in the presence of failures. A complete formalization of the protocol using Abstract State Machines is also presented.