Validation and Inference of Schema-Level Workflow Data-Dependency Annotations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reasoning framework that validates and infers detailed data dependency annotations in scientific workflows, improving the accuracy of provenance and lineage analysis.

Contribution

It extends previous dependency annotation work by providing a consistency checking and inference framework for workflow specifications using answer-set programming.

Findings

Framework ensures consistency of dependency annotations

Can infer complete annotations from partial data

Implementation demonstrates practical applicability

Abstract

An advantage of scientific workflow systems is their ability to collect runtime provenance information as an execution trace. Traces include the computation steps invoked as part of the workflow run along with the corresponding data consumed and produced by each workflow step. The information captured by a trace is used to infer "lineage" relationships among data items, which can help answer provenance queries to find workflow inputs that were involved in producing specific workflow outputs. Determining lineage relationships, however, requires an understanding of the dependency patterns that exist between each workflow step's inputs and outputs, and this information is often under-specified or generally assumed by workflow systems. For instance, most approaches assume all outputs depend on all inputs, which can lead to lineage "false positives". In prior work, we defined annotations for specifying detailed dependency relationships between inputs and outputs of computation steps. These annotations are used to define corresponding rules for inferring fine-grained data dependencies from a trace. In this paper, we extend our previous work by considering the impact of dependency annotations on workflow specifications. In particular, we provide a reasoning framework to ensure the set of dependency annotations on a workflow specification is consistent. The framework can also infer a complete set of annotations given a partially annotated workflow. Finally, we describe an implementation of the reasoning framework using answer-set programming.