Provenance as a Service: A Data-centric Approach for Real-Time Monitoring

Provenance of electronic data is an important piece of the metadata of a data object. Making systems provenance-aware can greatly benefit all parties involved. This paper discusses the importance of data provenance and presents an open cloud architecture named CloudProv, a framework to integrate, model, and monitor the provenance data. Our elastic cloud architecture will provide an open APIs which allows independent organizations to develop applications that can share and integrate provenance data across internal and external organizational boundaries. We propose a method to model the collected provenance information in such a way that can be used for continuous compliance monitoring and for root cause analysis. We have implemented a prototype of our framework, and used it to verify how we can generate a service model for provenance data using a small, but interesting set of data. We present a design of our proposed framework and its components along with a prototype implementation.