Using semantic web technologies for representing E-science provenance

Life science researchers increasingly rely on the web as a primary source of data, forcing them to apply the same rigor to its use as to an experiment in the laboratory. The myGrid project is developing the use of workflows to explicitly capture web-based procedures, and provenance to describe how and why results were produced. Experience within myGrid has shown that this provenance metadata is formed from a complex web of heterogenous resources that impact on the production of a result. Therefore we have explored the use of Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, and ontologies to support its representation and used existing initiatives such as Jena and LSID, to generate and store such material. The effective presentation of complex RDF graphs is challenging. Haystack has been used to provide multiple views of provenance metadata that can be further annotated. This work therefore forms a case study showing how existing Semantic Web tools can effectively support the emerging requirements of life science research. © Springer-Verlag 2004.