ESDS-RFC-015

Title

Provenance within Data Interoperability Standards

Abstract

This document presents a data provenance proof of concept developed for the CEOP Satellite Data Server, a NASA ACCESS project that provides a gateway between the OPeNDAP and WCS protocols.  The gateway allows a user to use an OPeNDAP enabled client to access satellite data held at a WCS server.  This project was done as part of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Working Group and Systems and Services (WGISS) project activity, the WGISS Test Facility for CEOP.  A key request by users was to know the provenance (i.e., original data and subsequent processing history) of the results from an OPeNDAP request that were in turn served by a WCS server. This proof of concept presents one way of transmitting that information over the WCS protocol, through the gateway and then over the OPeNDAP protocol.

The provenance prototype we developed demonstrates that provenance can be transmitted to legacy clients, allowing them to make effective use of provenance information for virtual products resulting from workflow chains. Our approach of embedding provenance in data payloads also has the benefit of persisting along with the output product, making data management more tractable. However, it suffers from length and structure limitations imposed by the data payload within which it rides. Ideally, we would like to combine the richness and scalability benefits of the more elegant out-of-band solution with the usability of the embedded solution.

Synopsis

ESDS-RFC- 015 Technical Working Group Report

The ESDS-RFC-015 Technical Working Group (TWG) has conducted a review of ESDS-RFC-015 - Provenance within Data Interoperability Standards with the following conclusion:

ESDS-RFC-015 should remain open until the TWG can elicit at least three reviews of this technical note.