Authors: Luc Moreau, Syd Chapman, Andreas Schreiber, Rolf Hempel, Omer Rana, Laszlo Varga, Ulises Cortes, Steven Willmott
Current evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services,
ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development
of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systemsCurrent evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services,
ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development
of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting
with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services)
are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the rst largescale
open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an
important testing ground for problems in trust management which are
likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suer
from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of
infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns
in open grids, in which \community resources" are owned and managed
by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations.
Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result
has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation
of services that produced such a particular output. Against this
background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement
an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems.
We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely
aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics.
Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure
architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data
structures, a set of tools for conguring and using the provenance architecture,
an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and
validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich
grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving
complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audittrails
of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a
result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to
occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be oered to users and will
give them a competitive edge.
