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A templating system to generate provenance

A templating system to generate provenance
A templating system to generate provenance
PROV-Template is a declarative approach that enables designers and programmers to design and generate provenance compatible with the PROV standard of the World Wide Web Consortium. Designers specify the topology of the provenance to be generated by composing templates, which are provenance graphs containing variables, acting as placeholders for values. Programmers write programs that log values and package them up in sets of bindings, a data structure associating variables and values. An expansion algorithm generates instantiated provenance from templates and sets of bindings in any of the serialisation formats supported by PROV. A quantitative evaluation shows that sets of bindings have a size that is typically 40% of that of expanded provenance templates and that the expansion algorithm is suitably tractable, operating in fractions of milliseconds for the type of templates surveyed in the article. Furthermore, the approach shows four significant software engineering benefits: separation of responsibilities, provenance maintenance, potential runtime checks and static analysis, and provenance consumption. The article gathers quantitative data and qualitative benefits descriptions from four different applications making use of PROV-Template. The system is implemented and released in the open-source library ProvToolbox for provenance processing.
103 - 121
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Batlajery, Belfrit Victor
2ab3069d-8734-4ba0-9846-ec0ef8cdb897
Huynh, Dong
ddea6cf3-5a82-4c99-8883-7c31cf22dd36
Michaelides, Danius
a6df5175-d71a-4cd4-befc-26c48235fb92
Packer, Heather
0e86c31f-6460-4bbd-b6ac-c717ee2cbd96
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Batlajery, Belfrit Victor
2ab3069d-8734-4ba0-9846-ec0ef8cdb897
Huynh, Dong
ddea6cf3-5a82-4c99-8883-7c31cf22dd36
Michaelides, Danius
a6df5175-d71a-4cd4-befc-26c48235fb92
Packer, Heather
0e86c31f-6460-4bbd-b6ac-c717ee2cbd96

Moreau, Luc, Batlajery, Belfrit Victor, Huynh, Dong, Michaelides, Danius and Packer, Heather (2018) A templating system to generate provenance. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 44 (2), 103 - 121, [7909036]. (doi:10.1109/TSE.2017.2659745).

Record type: Article

Abstract

PROV-Template is a declarative approach that enables designers and programmers to design and generate provenance compatible with the PROV standard of the World Wide Web Consortium. Designers specify the topology of the provenance to be generated by composing templates, which are provenance graphs containing variables, acting as placeholders for values. Programmers write programs that log values and package them up in sets of bindings, a data structure associating variables and values. An expansion algorithm generates instantiated provenance from templates and sets of bindings in any of the serialisation formats supported by PROV. A quantitative evaluation shows that sets of bindings have a size that is typically 40% of that of expanded provenance templates and that the expansion algorithm is suitably tractable, operating in fractions of milliseconds for the type of templates surveyed in the article. Furthermore, the approach shows four significant software engineering benefits: separation of responsibilities, provenance maintenance, potential runtime checks and static analysis, and provenance consumption. The article gathers quantitative data and qualitative benefits descriptions from four different applications making use of PROV-Template. The system is implemented and released in the open-source library ProvToolbox for provenance processing.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 20 January 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 24 April 2017
Published date: 1 February 2018
Additional Information: Dataset available from http://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/390436 Funded by EPSRC: The use of interactive electronic-books in the teaching and application of modern quantitative methods in the social sciences (ES/K007246/1)
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 405025
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/405025
PURE UUID: 17161436-62db-4ce3-bb74-8d1076bc32df
ORCID for Luc Moreau: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3494-120X
ORCID for Belfrit Victor Batlajery: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-7637-9481
ORCID for Dong Huynh: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4937-2473

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 23 Jan 2017 11:20
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 06:15

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Contributors

Author: Luc Moreau ORCID iD
Author: Belfrit Victor Batlajery ORCID iD
Author: Dong Huynh ORCID iD
Author: Danius Michaelides
Author: Heather Packer

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