OPUS: A Lightweight System for Observational Provenance in User Space

A variety of current provenance systems address the challenges of provenance capture, storage and query. However they require special setup and configuration, do not capture all I/O operations and limit themselves to specific specialised platforms. In this paper we propose the design of a data provenance capture and query tool called OPUS. OPUS works entirely in user space, is light-weight and requires minimum user intervention. OPUS is based on a formal model for versioning provenance objects that enables the succinct, complete representation of I/O operations in a manner that abstracts it from the details of the underlying operating system.