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Data Provenance

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 107 Accesses

Synonyms

Data lineage; Data pedigree; Data tracking; Provenance metadata

Definition

The term “data provenance” refers to a record trail that accounts for the origin of a piece of data (in a database, document or repository) together with an explanation of how and why it got to the present place.

Example

In an application like Molecular Biology, a lot of data is derived from public databases, which in turn might be derived from papers but after some transformations (only the most significant data were put in the public database), which are derived from experimental observations. A provenance record will keep this history for each piece of data.

Key Points

Databases today do not have a good way of managing provenance data and the subject is an active research area. One category of provenance research focuses on the case where one database derives some of its data by querying another database, and one may try to “invert” the query to determine which input data elements contribute to this...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bose R, Frew J. Lineage retrieval for scientific data processing: a survey. ACM Comput Surv. 2005;37(1):1–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Buneman P, Khanna S, Tajima K, Tan W-C. Archiving scientific data. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data; 2002. p. 1–12.

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  3. Buneman P, Khanna S, Tan WC. On propagation of deletions and annotations through views. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems; 2002. p. 150–8.

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  4. Simmhan YL, Plale B, Gannon D. A survey of data provenance techniques. Technical Report TR618, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University; 2005.

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  5. Widom J. Trio: a system for integrated management of data, accuracy, and lineage. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research; 2005. p. 262–76.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Amarnath Gupta

Authors
  1. Amarnath Gupta
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amarnath Gupta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. San Diego Supercomputer Center, Univ. of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, 92093-0505, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Amarnath Gupta

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Gupta, A. (2016). Data Provenance. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1305-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1305-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

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