How Can International Standards Support Scientific Lineage Needs?

Recording the provenance of large-scale scientific datasets is an incredible challenge that will attracted a significant number of creative solutions. Many of these solutions will likely be customized in order to address specific needs of organizations that develop them. At the same time, standard representations of the provenance are required for preservation and ease of understanding by a wide variety of non-expert users. Emerging international metadata standards include mechanisms for describing provenance that are necessarily general and simplified. We will describe these mechanisms and some applications to begin to characterize situations in which these standards are useful.