Butterfly: A Model of Provenance

Semantically rich metadata is foreseen to be pervasive in tomorrow\u27s cyber world. People are more willing to store metadata in the hope that such extra information will enable a wide range of novel business intelligent applications. Provenance is metadata which describes the derivation history of data. It is considered to have great potential for helping the reasoning, analyzing, validating, monitoring, integrating and reusing of data. Although there are a few application-specific systems equipped with some degree of provenance tracking functionality, few formal models of provenance are present. A general purpose, formal model of provenance is desirable not only to widely promote the storage and inventive usage of provenance, but also to prepare for the emergence of so called provenance management system. In this thesis, I propose Butterfly, a general purpose provenance model, which offers the capability to model, store, and query provenance. It consists of a semantic model for describing provenance, and an extensible algebraic query model for querying provenance. An initial implementation of the provenance model is also briefly discussed