Generalized Architecture to Capture End to End Provenance in a System

Provenance is the metadata about the origin, context or history of data on how it came into its present state of being. Data in our context are files. The information about how the file was created and maintained can throw a lot of information on the credibility of data stored in the file. This information can be obtained by collecting the provenance of data. In this paper we propose a generalized framework to capture provenance information of files in a system and present a prototype tool which capture cut/copy/paste dependency of files in Linux X Windows as a proof of concept for our idea.