Geospatial data provenance in Cyberinfrastructure

A new generation of information infrastructure, Cyberinfrastructure, is being developed to support the next generation of geoscientific research. Constructing distributed and complex geo-processing workflows is an important activity in Cyberinfrastructure. As more and more scientists use geo-processing workflow or service chains to integrate various distributed data and services to perform geoscientific analyses, it becomes important to capture the provenance (i.e. processing history), also known as lineage, of a particular derived data product, so that researchers can determine the reliability of the data products, validate and reproduce scientific results in the Cyberinfrastructure when needed. This paper gives an overview of recent methods on data provenance in both the general information domain and geospatial domain. Key considerations for development of geospatial provenance-aware service-oriented applications in Cyberinfrastructure are highlighted. The results will be helpful for geoscientists in (1) understanding the validity of developing and using provenance-aware geospatial applications, (2) assessing what operational system framework and approaches are available and applicable within their applications, and (3) identifying the critical issues and directing future research agenda for provenance-aware applications in Geo-Cyberinfrastructure.