Provenienz (engl. provenance) beschreibt die Entstehungsgeschichte von Objekten. Die Provenienz eines Dokumentes beinhaltet jede zwischenzeitliche Dokumentenversionen, deren Autoren als auch die jeweiligen Dokumentenaenderungen. Diese Information erlaubt das Erstellen von detailierten Zugriffsberichten, die Validierung bestehender Objekte als auch das Wiederherstellen alter Objektversionen.<br />Provenienz-Architekturen beinhalten Komponenten zur Sammlung, Speicherung und Analyse von Provenienz, deren Implementierung ist zumeist Aufgabe der Anwendungsprogrammierer. Diese Situation fuehrt zu Inselloesungen die nicht standard-konform sind und deren Wartung langfristig hohe Kosten verursacht.<br />
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Provenance describes how objects came into their current state, e.g. it describes different contributions to a document. This information provides detailed audit trails, verification of existing objects as well as reenactment of recorded activities. Provenance solutions consist of data gathering, storage and analysis, its implementation is delegated to domain application developers. This leads to custom provenance solutions that do not adhere to standards and are expensive to maintain. The domain developer's productivity also suffers.<br />We propose a generic provenance system that can be adapted for different domain applications. It employs advanced unobtrusive data capturing techniques to minimize overhead imposed upon domain developers.<br />Provenance data is refined and results are provided to developers through an easily usable interface. This allows domain developers to focus upon their domain tasks.<br />To prove the feasibility of our approach a prototype system has been implemented within Ruby on Rails. As domain application an existing experiment management solution was chosen and made provenance-aware.
