Provenance Holder: Bringing Provenance, Reproducibility and Trust to Flexible Scientific Workflows and Choreographies

Process adaptation has been in the focus of the BPM community also in the scope of interdisciplinary research on the interface with eScience. In eScience, scientists, software developers and analysts across a range of disciplines model, create and execute different types of data-driven experiments in an exploratory, trial-and-error style. Supporting this style of experimenting by software systems has been enabled in existing work by interactive workflow management systems. The main principles and techniques used are related to the adaptation of workflows and choreographies, as well as to systems integration and software architecture improvement. With the increasing need for collaboration in scientific explorations and adaptation remaining an essential part of the techniques used, the trust in the reproducibility of scientific research gains a most significant importance. To ensure trust in the provenance and reproducibility of collaborative and adaptable scientific experiments, in this paper we introduce a system architecture with focus on a new component that is responsible for ensuring trust in a generic and non-intrusive manner, independent of different process-aware technologies and storage platforms, including blockchain. We contribute the architecture of the Provenance Holder, its components, functionality and two main operations: recording provenance data and retrieving the trusted provenance information. We incorporate the Provenance Holder into the architecture of the interactive ChorSystem and identify the potential directions for future research.