[TYPES/announce] Workshop on Principles of Provenance

[James Cheney]

[Relevance to TYPES: Recent work on provenance in databases has focused on
typed languages extended with collection types; provenance is related to
program dependence analysis and information flow.  See

http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2173

]

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                       Call for Abstracts/Position Papers

                  Workshop on Principles of Provenance (PROPR)
                              Edinburgh, Scotland
                             19-20 November, 2007.

                  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/propr/
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Recent research in a variety of settings (databases and data warehouses,
file
systems, geographic information systems, scientific workflow, "grid"
computation, and the Semantic Web) has addressed the problem of keeping
track of
metadata about creation and modification history, influences, ownership, and
other provenance or lineage information. Such metadata is essential for
making
informed judgments about data quality, integrity, and authenticity.
In addition, ideas about provenance are now being used in several areas of
computer science such as probabilistic databases, file synchronization, and
annotation propagation. Other topics, such as version control and archiving,
may
also benefit from better understanding of provenance.  We believe the time
is
ripe to develop the foundations of the topic and address questions such as:

* What is and what isn't provenance?
* What problems do real-world uses of provenance address, and how can we
  formalize correctness for proposed solutions to such problems in computer
  systems?
* How can we compare models of or approaches to provenance?
* Why does provenance tracking/management seem hard to get right, despite
its
  seeming obviousness ("just record everything about the history of the
data")?
* Where should research efforts be focused in order to best make progress?

Following an informal meeting in June at the University of Pennsylvania, we
are
organizing this workshop with the goal of bringing together researchers from
different backgrounds (including databases, scientific data & workflow
management, programming languages) interested in principles of provenance.

The workshop is open to all interested parties.  If you are interested in
making
a presentation, please send a short (no more than 2 pages) abstract
describing a
talk or discussion (to jcheney at inf.ed.ac.uk).  We think a typical talk would
first introduce existing ideas or techniques in a given area of the
speaker's
expertise and then move on to foundational questions (and, if possible,
answers); we hope to have a program with a mix of talks or discussions with
a
speculative or agenda-setting component and talks which review recent work
or
systems.

There will be no formal proceedings, but we will post talk abstracts and
slides on the web.

We hope to be able to offer a slot to anyone who wishes to speak, but
may not be able to accommodate all requests.

Abstract deadline:  October 8, 2007.
Notification:       October 15, 2007.
Workshop:           November 19-20, 2007.

--Workshop organizers
Peter Buneman
James Cheney
Bertram Ludaescher
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