Provenance and Scientific Workflows: Challenges and Opportunities

Summary: Provenance in scientific workflows spans data products and workflow specifications to enable reproducibility, sharing, and reuse. Surveys current systems' provenance support, highlights emerging applications, and sketches open problems and directions for database research. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h5b67dc8717941c3b
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2008
Pagerank: 0.00012939577
Overall Rank: 943 | 93.67%
DOI: 10.1145/1376616.1376772

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Susan B. Davidson (University of Pennsylvania)
2. Juliana Freire (University of Utah)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{davidson_sigmod08,
        title = {{Provenance and Scientific Workflows: Challenges and Opportunities}},
        author = {Davidson, Susan B. and Freire, Juliana},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '08},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1376616.1376772},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1376616.1376772},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 29 of 29 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,389	Provenance for Generalized Map and Reduce Workflows	2011	CIDR	0.00010818511
1,767	Putting Lipstick on Pig: Enabling Database-style Workflow Provenance	2012	VLDB	9.6910812e-05
1,847	Data Market Platforms: Trading Data Assets to Solve Data Problems	2020	VLDB	9.5091361e-05
2,687	Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors	2015	SIGMOD	8.1271333e-05
4,684	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB	6.4692258e-05
5,902	Bolt-on, Compact, and Rapid Program Slicing for Notebooks	2022	VLDB	5.9516808e-05
6,039	ReproZip: Computational Reproducibility With Ease	2016	SIGMOD	5.9055191e-05
6,048	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.9024167e-05
6,193	Fine-Grained Lineage for Safer Notebook Interactions	2021	VLDB	5.8538103e-05
6,357	Packing Experiments for Sharing and Publication	2013	SIGMOD	5.8064898e-05
6,712	Selective Provenance for Datalog Programs Using Top-K Queries	2015	VLDB	5.70009e-05
7,392	Sailing the Information Ocean with Awareness of Currents: Discovery and Application of Source Dependence	2009	CIDR	5.5351339e-05
7,561	Detecting and Resolving Unsound Workflow Views for Correct Provenance Analysis	2009	SIGMOD	5.4949533e-05
7,850	SOLOMON: Seeking the Truth Via Copying Detection	2010	VLDB	5.4393882e-05
7,955	Provenance: On and Behind the Screens	2016	SIGMOD	5.4174465e-05
8,033	Dependency-Driven Analytics: a Compass for Uncharted Data Oceans	2017	CIDR	5.4017733e-05
8,277	Distributed Time-aware Provenance	2013	VLDB	5.3618022e-05
8,381	Meta-Dataflows: Efficient Exploratory Dataflow Jobs	2018	SIGMOD	5.3411788e-05
9,353	Tracking Personal Data Use: Provenance And Trust	2015	CIDR	5.1878222e-05
9,604	Equivalence-Invariant Algebraic Provenance for Hyperplane Update Queries	2020	SIGMOD	5.1534211e-05
9,947	NLProv: Natural Language Provenance	2016	VLDB	5.1038803e-05
10,197	LPStream: Fine-grained Lazy Provenance for Stream Processing	2026	SIGMOD	5.0599411e-05
10,257	PROPOLIS: Provisioned Analysis of Data-Centric Processes	2013	VLDB	5.0490212e-05
10,655	FlowPilot: A Suggestion System for Designing Scientific Workflows	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,406	Even Metadata is Getting Big: Annotation Summarization using InsightNotes	2015	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,431	SAASFEE: Scalable Scientific Workflow Execution Engine	2015	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,509	A Provenance Framework for Data-Dependent Process Analysis	2014	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,835	PDiffView: Viewing the Difference in Provenance of Workflow Results	2009	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
14,063	WOLVES: Achieving Correct Provenance Analysis by Detecting and Resolving Unsound Workflow Views	2009	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
319	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021155013
2,036	Querying Business Processes	2006	VLDB	9.1502528e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,555	Computational Reproducibility: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Database Research Opportunities	2012	SIGMOD
2	2,838	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR
3	14,059	Storing Scientific Workflows in a Database	2009	VLDB
4	13,731	Theory and Practice of Provenance	2022	SIGMOD
5	2,172	Provenance Management in Curated Databases	2006	SIGMOD
6	1,914	Efficient Lineage Tracking For Scientific Workflows	2008	SIGMOD
7	7,366	Enabling Privacy in Provenance-Aware Workflow Systems	2011	CIDR
8	8,504	Querying and Re-Using Workflows with VisTrails	2008	SIGMOD
9	7,955	Provenance: On and Behind the Screens	2016	SIGMOD
10	12,947	Provenance in Databases (Tutorial Outline)	2007	SIGMOD