Semantically annotated provenance in the Life Science Grid

Selected semantic annotation on raw provenance data can help bridge the gap between low level provenance events (e.g., service invocations, data creation, message passing) and the high-level view that the user has of his/her investigation (e.g., data retrieval and analysis). In this initial investigation we added semantically annotated provenance to the Life Science Grid, a cyber-infrastructure framework supporting interactive data exploration and automated data analysis tools, through (i) automated data provenance collection and (ii) automated semantic enrichment of the collected provenance metadata. We use a paradigmatic life sciences use case of interactive data exploration to show that semantically annotated provenance can help users recognize the occurrence of specific patterns of investigation from an otherwise low-level sequence of elementary interaction events.