Principles of Data Integration

14

Data Provenance

The majority of this book has focused on how to take data from a plethora of sources and formats and integrate it into a single homogeneous view — such that it becomes indistinguishable from data with other origins. Sometimes, however, we would still like to be able to take a tuple from an integrated schema and determine where it came from and how it came to be.

This motivates a topic of study called data provenance, or sometimes data lineage or data pedigree. A data item’s provenance is a record of how it came to be. In the broadest sense, this provenance may include a huge number of factors, e.g., who created the initial data, when they created them, or what equipment they used. Typically, however, in the database community ...