Model-Driven Engineering for Data Provenance: A Graphical W3C PROV Modeling Tool
摘要
Data provenance is crucial for capturing and tracing the origins, transformations, and movements of data, ensuring its reliability, integrity, and quality, particularly in IoT and ubiquitous computing environments. The W3C introduced the PROV standard, which includes a data model (PROV-DM) for representing provenance instances. Despite the importance of provenance modeling, there is a significant lack of tools that enable developers to graphically create provenance models. Consequently, developers often rely on textual notations like PROV-N, which necessitate cumbersome conversions to generate static graphical representations. This paper presents a graphical tool for creating data provenance models in compliance with the W3C PROV standard. The tool facilitates intuitive and interactive graphical provenance modeling, from which the corresponding PROV-N code can be easily obtained. Developed using Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) principles, the process involved converting PROV-DM into an Ecore metamodel and implementing the tool with Eclipse Sirius, along with model-to-text transformations using Eclipse Acceleo. This work addresses the absence of graphical modeling tools for provenance design, offering developers an effective solution for managing data provenance interactively.