Provenance is a well understood concept in the study of ?ne art, where it refers to the documented history of an art object. Given that documented history, the objectattains anauthority that allows scholarsto understandand appreciateits importance and context relative to other works. In the absence of such history, art objects may be treated with some skepticism by those who study and view them. Over the last few years, a number of teams have been applying this concept of provenance to data and information generated within computer systems. If the provenance of data produced by computer...

As the Web allows information sharing, discovery, aggregation, filtering and flow in an unprecedented manner, it also becomes very difficult to identify, reliably, the original source that produced an information item on the Web. Hence, provenance, i.e., the origin or source of something, is becoming an important concern, since it offers the means to verify data products, to infer their quality, to analyse the processes that led to them, and to decide whether they can be trusted. For instance, provenance enables the reproducibility of scientific results; provenance is necessary to track...