Data provenance: Some basic issues

The ease with which one can copy and transform data on the Web, has made it increasingly difficult to determine the origins of a piece of data. We use the term data provenance to refer to the process of tracing and recording the origins of data and its movement between databases. Provenance is now an acute issue in scientific databases where it is central to the validation of data. In this paper we discuss some of the technical issues that have emerged in an initial exploration of the topic.