Large-scale, dynamic and open environments such as the Grid and Web Services build upon existing computing infrastructures to supply dependable and consistent large-scale computational systems. This kind of architecture has been adopted by the business and scientific communities allowing them to exploit extensive and diverse computing resources to perform complex data processing tasks. In such systems, results are often derived by composing multiple, geographically distributed, heterogeneous services as specified by intricate workflow management. This leads to the undesirable situation where the results are known, but the means by which they were achieved is not. With both scientific experiments and business transactions, the notion of lineage and dataset derivation is of paramount importance since without it, information is potentially worthless. We address the issue of data provenance, the description of the origin of a piece of data, in these environments showing the requirements, uses and implementation difficulties. We propose an infrastructure level support for a provenance recording capability for service-oriented architectures such as the Grid and Web Services. We also offer services to view and retrieve provenance and we provide a mechanism by which provenance is used to determine whether previous computed results are still up to date.

Like experiments performed at a laboratory bench, the data associated with an e-Science experiment are of reduced value if other scientists are not able to identify the origin, or provenance, of those data. Provenance information is essential if experiments are to be validated and verified by others, or even by those who originally performed them. In this article, we give an overview of our initial work on the provenance of bioinformatics e-Science experiments within myGrid. We use two kinds of provenance: the derivation path of information and annotation. We show how this kind of provenance can be delivered within the myGrid demonstrator WorkBench and we explore how the resulting Webs of experimental data holdings can be mined for useful information and presentations for the e-Scientist.

Both the scientific and business communities are beginning to rely on Grids as problemsolving mechanisms. These communities also have requirements in terms of provenance. Provenance is the documentation of process and the necessity for it is apparent in fields ranging from medicine to aerospace. To support provenance capture in Grids, we have developed an implementation-independent protocol for the recording of provenance. We describe the protocol in the context of a service-oriented architecture and formalise the entities involved using an abstract state machine or a three-dimensional state transition diagram. Using these techniques we sketch a liveness property for the system.