Provenance-Based Validation of E-Science Experiments

Abstract. E-Science experiments typically involve many distributed services main-tained by different organisations. After an experiment has been executed, it is useful for a scientist to verify that the execution was performed correctly or is compatible with some existing experimental criteria or standards, not necessarily anticipated prior to execution. Scientists may also want to review and verify ex-periments performed by their colleagues. There are no existing frameworks for validating such experiments in today’s e-Science systems. Users therefore have to rely on error checking performed by the services, or adopt other ad hoc methods. This paper introduces a platform-independent framework for validating workflow executions. The validation relies on reasoning over the documented provenance of experiment results and semantic descriptions of services advertised in a reg-istry. This validation process ensures experiments are performed correctly, and thus results generated are meaningful. The framework is tested in a bioinformat-ics application that performs protein compressibility analysis