Provenance information documents the history of an object and can be used for assessing its quality, reliability, and trustworthiness. In cases when an object traverses through different organizations, its provenance can be generated and stored independently in different places, therefore integrity of provenance is required. Interconnected distributed parts of provenance form distributed provenance chains. The goal of the thesis is to analyze how updates of individual provenance parts and their integrity verification can affect the traceability of objects represented in provenance chains. In particular, the student should:
- get familiar with PROV-DM data model for provenance representation;
- get familiar with how updates of existing provenance parts can be expressed in meta-provenance;
- work out illustrative cases, which can occur in the context of updates and integrity verification of individual provenance parts;
- express these situations in terms of PROV-DM;
- verify, whether the updates can disrupt traceability of objects and integrity verification process in distributed provenance chains.
Expected outputs of the thesis are sets of interconnected and digitally signed provenance parts, demonstrating the cases in provenance chains, and evaluation of findings. The implementation part of the thesis serves as an illustrative demonstration of the student's findings. Representation of distributed provenance chains is part of the current state of the art in provenance-related research. Combining the representation with further management and integrity verification requirements is an unexplored topic. Findings discovered during this thesis have the potential to become a part of a scientific publication.