Geoscience Data Provenance: An Overview

The advancement of Earth observing sensors, data, and information systems enhances significantly the capabilities to access and process large volumes of geoscience data, which are often consumed by scientific workflows and processed in a distributed information environment. Consequently, data provenance becomes important since it allows users to determine the usability and reliability of data products. Motivation for capturing and sharing provenance also comes from the distributed data and information infrastructure that has been benefiting the Earth science community in the past decade, such as spatial data and information infrastructure, e-Science, and cyberinfrastructure. This paper provides an overview of geoscience data provenance in supporting provenance-aware geoscience data and information systems by summarizing state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies of geoscience data provenance and highlighting key considerations and possible solutions for geoscience data provenance.