Abstract
Change-based provenance captures how an entity is constructed; it can be used not only as a record of the steps taken but also as a guide during the development of derivative or new analyses. This provenance is captured as a version tree which stores a set of related entities and the exact changes made in deriving one from another. Version trees are generally viewed as monotonic–new nodes may be added but none are modified or deleted. However, there are a number of operations (e.g., upgrades) where this constraint leads to inefficient and unintuitive new versions. To address this, we propose a version tree without monotonicity where nodes may be modified and new actions inserted. We also propose to track the provenance of these tree changes to ensure that past version trees are not lost. This provenance is change-based; it links versions of version trees by the actions which transform the trees. Thus, we continue to track every change that impacts the evolution of an entity, but the actions are split between direct edits and changes to the version tree that affect multiple entity definitions. We show how this provenance leads to more intuitive and efficient operations on workflows and how this hybrid provenance may be understood.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Ba, M.L., Abdessalem, T., Senellart, P.: Uncertain version control in open collaborative editing of tree-structured documents. In: Proceedings 2013 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, pp. 27–36. ACM (2013)
Bhattacherjee, S., Chavan, A., Huang, S., Deshpande, A., Parameswaran, A.: Principles of dataset versioning: exploring the recreation/storage tradeoff. Proc. VLDB Endow. 8(12), 1346–1357 (2015)
Bose, R., Frew, J.: Lineage retrieval for scientific data processing: a survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 37(1), 1–28 (2005)
Buneman, P., Khanna, S., Tan, W.C.: Why and where: a characterization of data provenance. In: Proceedings 8th International Conference on Database Theory, pp. 316–330. Springer-Verlag (2001)
Conradi, R., Westfechtel, B.: Version models for software configuration management. ACM Comput. Surv. 30(2), 232–282 (1998)
Darcs. http://darcs.net/
De Nies, T., Magliacane, S., Verborgh, R., Coppens, S., Groth, P., Mannens, E., Van de Walle, R.: Git2PROV: exposing version control system content as W3C PROV. In: Poster and Demo Proceedings of 12th International Semantic Web Conference (2013)
Freire, J.-L., Silva, C.T., Callahan, S.P., Santos, E., Scheidegger, C.E., Vo, H.T.: Managing rapidly-evolving scientific workflows. In: Moreau, L., Foster, I. (eds.) IPAW 2006. LNCS, vol. 4145, pp. 10–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Git. http://git-scm.com/
Koop, D., Freire, J.: Reorganizing workflow evolution provenance. In: 6th USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance (Tapp. 2014) (2014)
Koop, D., Scheidegger, C.E., Freire, J., Silva, C.T.: The provenance of workflow upgrades. In: McGuinness, D.L., Michaelis, J.R., Moreau, L. (eds.) IPAW 2010. LNCS, vol. 6378, pp. 2–16. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Leitner, P., Michlmayr, A., Rosenberg, F., Dustdar, S.: End-to-end versioning support for web services. In: IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, pp. 59–66 (2008)
Lins, L.D., Ferreira, N., Freire, J., Silva, C.T.: Maximum common subelement metrics and its applications to graphs. CoRR abs/1501.06774 (2015)
Özsoyoğlu, G., Snodgrass, R.T.: Temporal and real-time databases: a survey. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 7(4), 513–532 (1995)
Sabel, M.: Structuring wiki revision history. In: Proceedings 2007 International Symposium on Wikis, NY, USA, pp. 125–130. ACM, New York (2007)
Scheidegger, C.E., Vo, H.T., Koop, D., Freire, J., Silva, C.T.: Querying and creating visualizations by analogy. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comp. Graph. 13(6), 1560–1567 (2007)
Subversion (svn). https://subversion.apache.org
Taentzer, G., Ermel, C., Langer, P., Wimmer, M.: A fundamental approach to model versioning based on graph modifications: from theory to implementation. Softw. Syst. Model. 13(1), 239–272 (2014)
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Juliana Freire for her suggestions and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This work was supported in part by NSF CNS-1405927.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Koop, D. (2016). Versioning Version Trees: The Provenance of Actions that Affect Multiple Versions. In: Mattoso, M., Glavic, B. (eds) Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes. IPAW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9672. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40593-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40593-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40592-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40593-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)