Knowledge Provenance for Virtual Observatories

Virtual Observatories present a growing trend as a new paradigm supporting distributed interdisciplinary scientific research. As virtual observatories are becoming more commonplace with a wider range of users, additional requirements are being identified and some previous requirements are becoming more important. In this presentation, we describe knowledge provenance requirements that have emerged in our previous work on virtual observatories as well as requirements identified from a number of scientific communities. We use knowledge provenance in a broad sense to include the origins of knowledge in any virtual system. This includes sources of raw data; experiments used to generate data, processing applied to the data, etc. We will describe a new sponsored research effort entitled Semantic Provenance Capture in Data Ingest Systems (SPCDIS) where we focus on providing an extensible representation for provenance in data systems. In this NSF OCI/SDCI- funded project we will implement an extensible meta data provenance scheme for one existing virtual observatory - the Virtual Solar Terrestrial-Observatory.