Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes

Computinghasbeenanenormousacceleratortoscienceandindustryalikeandit has led to an information explosion in many di?erent ?elds. The unprecedented volume of data acquired from sensors, derived by simulations and data analysis processes, accumulated in warehouses, and often shared on the Web, has given risetoanew?eldofresearch:provenancemanagement.Provenance(alsoreferred to as audit trail, lineage, and pedigree) captures information about the steps used to generate a given data product. Such information provides important documentation that is key to preserving data, to determining the data's quality and authorship, to understanding, reproducing, as well as validating results. Provenancemanagement has become an active ?eld of research,as evidenced byrecentspecializedworkshops,surveys,andtutorials.Provenancesolutionsare needed in many di?erent domains and applications, from environmental science and physics simulations, to business processes and data integration in wa- houses. Not surprisingly, di?erent techniques and provenance models have been proposed in many areas such as work?ow systems, visualization, databases, d- ital libraries, and knowledge representation. An important challenge we face - dayishowtointegratethesetechniquesandmodelssothatcompleteprovenance can be derived for complex data products. The InternationalProvenanceand AnnotationWorkshop(IPAW 2008)wasa follow-up to previous workshopsin Chigago (2006, 2002)and Edinburgh (2003). It was held during June 17-18, in Salt Lake City, at the University of Utah campus. IPAW 2008 brought together computer scientists from di?erent areas and provenance users to discuss open problems related to the provenance of computational and non-computational artifacts. A total of 55 people attended the workshop.