WIP: Provenance Support for Interdisciplinary Research on the North Creek Wetlands

Researchers working in the North Creek Wetlands are faced with the task of gathering and managing large amounts of data. This interdisciplinary group of researchers also require data provenance to ensure the integrity of their collected data. Currently, they record notes in the wetlands with pen and paper, transcribe these notes, and combine them with the other data they collected, such as spatial and image data. This process is error-prone and can be time consuming. Current provenance techniques also do not focus on supporting provenance from data collection to data processing and do not provide a flexible means of capturing provenance across different software tools and platforms. Our technique and our tool support, ProvEco System, leverages various technologies such as mobile devices, an off-the-shelf geographic information system software, an enterprise-level search facility, and open data standards to provide an interoperable provenance system. Our preliminary results indicate that our data collection application is easy to use and can assist with automatically reconstructing provenance for image files. We also offer generalizable lessons learned for developing a provenance system in other contexts.