Big Data Provenance Research Directions

Provenance is the "chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object". This term was initially relevant in the works of art and archeology but now finds use in other fields of science and information technology. Provenance is valuable in authenticating the value of an object. In the context of Information Technology, data provenance holds the history of the data item of how it reached its present state, i.e., the information of all the processes that transformed/influenced it. This information is useful for checking the correctness of information or to do error debugging. In this era of big data, where decisions are based on the insights derived by analyzing large variety of data automatically gathered, provenance becomes very important. The value/correctness of the insight depends on the correctness of the input data. Hence we need mechanisms that will vouch for the correctness of the data i.e., provenance. This paper gives an introduction to the concepts of provenance and reviews the work in Big Data provenance. The paper intends to give readers an understanding of the research direction in this area.