Title: Scientific provenance metadata capture and management using Semantic Web

Authors: Wander Gaspar; Regina Braga; Fernanda Campos; José Maria N. David; Tatiane Ornelas

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil ' Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil ' Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil ' Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil ' Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Abstract: Providing historical scientific information to deal with knowledge loss about scientific experiment is a strategical question in scientific research. One key aspect is the reuse of generated knowledge. Provenance data, extracted from multiple sources, must be reused in order to provide strategical information for scientists, including also inferred information based on these data. SciProv consists of an architecture that aims to interact with Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) for capturing and managing provenance metadata. This work adopts an approach based on a standard model to represent the lineage and to handle distributed and heterogeneous provenance metadata. Using ontologies and inference engines, SciProv provides resources to make inferences about provenance data and to obtain important results considering the extraction of information beyond those that are explicitly registered. The paper also presents proof of concept in bioinformatics domain.

Keywords: scientific experiments; provenance metadata; scientific workflow management; semantic web; open provenance model; ontology rules; scientific provenance; metadata capture; metadata management; knowledge loss; knowledge reuse; inference engines; information extraction; information retrieval; bioinformatics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2015.070829

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2015 Vol.10 No.2, pp.123 - 138

Received: 13 Nov 2014
Accepted: 27 Apr 2015
Published online: 28 Jul 2015 *

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