Traceability and Provenance are often used interchangeably in eScience, being associated with the need scientists have to document their experiments, and so allow experiments to be checked and reproduced by others. These terms have, however, different meanings: provenance is more often associated with data origins, whereas traceability concerns the interlinking and execution of processes. This paper proposes a set of mechanisms to deal with this last aspect, the solution is based on database research combined with scientific workflows, plus domain-specific knowledge stored in ontology structures. This meets a need from bioinformatics laboratories, where the majority of computer systems do not support traceability facilities. These mechanisms have been implemented in a prototype, and an example using the genome assembly problem is given.
展开▼