The Provenance of Workflow Upgrades

Provenance has become an increasingly important part of documenting, verifying, and reproducing scientific research, but as users seek to extend or share results, it may be impractical to start from the exact original steps due to system configuration differences, library updates, or new algorithms. Although there have been several approaches for capturing workflow provenance, the problem of managing upgrades of the underlying tools and libraries orchestrated by workflows has been largely overlooked. In this paper we consider the problem of maintaining and re-using the provenance of workflow upgrades. We propose different kinds of upgrades that can be applied, including automatic mechanisms, developer-specified, and user-defined. We show how to capture provenance from such upgrades and suggest how this provenance might be used to influence future upgrades. We also describe our implementation of these upgrade techniques. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.