[TYPES/announce] Call for Participation: Workshop on Principles of Provenance

[James Cheney]

[This announcement may be of interest to TYPES readers because
several of the talks that will be presented involve programming language
techniques applied to provenance.]

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                        Call for Participation

               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, geographic information systems, scientific workflows,
grid computing, 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, operating systems, 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, and programming
languages) interested in principles of provenance.

The workshop is open to all interested parties.  It will take place
at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, located in the
James Clerk Maxwell House in Edinburgh's historic New Town.

If you would like to participate, please contact James Cheney
(jcheney at inf.ed.ac.uk) so that we can accurately estimate attendance.
There is no registration fee.

The program has not been finalized.  Please consult the workshop web
page listed above for an up-to-date program.  The abstracts accepted
for presentation include:

    * Why provenance needs its own security model
      PASS Team, Harvard University

    * The use of provenance in information retrieval
      Simone Stumpf, Erin Fitzhenry, and Thomas G. Dietrich (Oregon
      State University)

    * WASABI (Web Accessible Sequence Analysis for Biological
      Inference): A data management framework for AFTOL (Assembling
      the Fungal Tree of Life)
      Frank Kauff (Universitat Kaiserslauten), Cymon Cox (Natural
      History Museum, London, UK), and Francois Lutzoni (Duke
      University)

    * Provenance Tracking in Climate Science Data Processing Systems
      Curt Tilmes (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

    * Combining Provenance and Security Policies in a Web-based
      Document Management System
      Brian J. Corcoran, Nikhil Swamy, and Michael Hicks (University
      of Maryland)

    * Towards a social provenance model for the Web
      Andreas Harth, Axel Polleres, and Stefan Decker (National
      University of Ireland, Galway)

    * ETL Scenarios: From Formal Specification to Optimization
      Timos Sellis, Dimitris Skoutas (National Technical University
      of Athens), Alkis Simitsis (IBM Almaden), and Panos Vassiliadis
      (University of Ioannina)

    * A formal model for dataflows, runs of dataflows, and provenance
      within runs
      Natalia Kwasnikowska and Jan Van den Bussche (Hasselt
      University and Transnational University of Limburg)

    * Programming trustworthy provenance
      Andrew Cirillo, Radha Jagadeesan, Corin Pitcher, and James
      Riely (DePaul University)

    * Provenance in Semantic Web Applications
      Sergej Sizov, Bernhard Schueler, and Steffen Staab (University
      of Koblenz-Landau)

    * The Open Provenance Model
      Luc Moreau (University of Southampton), Juliana Freire
      (University of Utah), Jim Myers, Joe Futrelle (NCSA), and
      Patrick Paulson (PNNL)

    * On the expressiveness of implicit provenance in query and
      update languages
      Stijn Vansummeren (Hasselt University and Transnational
      University of Limburg)


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

--Workshop organizers
Peter Buneman
James Cheney
Bertram Ludaescher