Selective Service Provenance in the VRESCo Runtime

In general, provenance describes the origin and well-documented history of a given object. This notion has been applied in information systems, mainly to provide data provenance of scientific workflows. Similar to this, provenance in Service-oriented Computing has also focused on data provenance. However, the authors argue that in service-centric systems the origin and history of services is equally important. This paper presents an approach that addresses service provenance. The authors show how service provenance information can be collected and retrieved, and how security mechanisms guarantee integrity and access to this information, while also providing user-specific views on provenance. Finally, the paper gives a performance evaluation of the authors’ approach, which has been integrated into the VRESCo Web service runtime environment.