A provenance model for manually curated data

Abstract

Many curated databases are constructed by scientists integrating various existing data sources "by hand", that is, by manually entering or copying data from other sources., Capturing provenance in such an environment is a challenging problem, requiring a good model of the process of curation. Existing models of provenance focus on queries/views in databases or computations on the Grid, not updates of databases or Web sites. In this paper we motivate and present a simple model of provenance for manually curated databases and discuss ongoing and future work.