PrIMe: a software engineering methodology for developing provenance-aware applications

Provenance is a concept often used in the Art world to refer to the documented history of an artifact, providing information about the artifact's lineage and authenticity. Provenance-aware applications similarly allow their users to have confidence about the data they produce, and can enable users to make judgements relating to notions of trust, accountability, validation, replication and compliance of their data. PrIMe is a software engineering methodology for adapting applications to enable them to interact with a provenance middleware layer, thereby making them provenance-aware. Such applications allow users to answer questions about provenance use cases, which are descriptions of scenarios in which a user interacts with a system by performing particular functions on that system. In order to illustrate how PrIMe can make applications provenance-aware, an Organ Transplant Management example application is used.