Data Provenance: Use Cases for the ESO archive, and Interactions with the Virtual Observatory

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of data provenance in the Virtual Observatory context, focusing on use cases, challenges, and standards for the ESO archive to enable better data interpretation and quality assessment.

Contribution

It identifies key use cases and challenges for implementing data provenance in the ESO archive and links these to ongoing IVOA standards development.

Findings

Use cases highlight the need for provenance in data interpretation.

Challenges include system complexity and standardization.

Linking provenance with IVOA standards facilitates interoperability.

Abstract

In the Virtual Observatory era, where we intend to expose scientists (or software agents on their behalf) to a stream of observations from all existing facilities, the ability to access and to further interpret the origin, relationships, and processing steps on archived astronomical assets (their Provenance) is a requirement for proper observation selection, and quality assessment. In this article we present the different use cases Data Provenance is needed for, the challenges inherent to building such a system for the ESO archive, and their link with ongoing work in the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA).