Provenance Artifact Identification in the Atmospheric Composition Processing System (ACPS)

The Atmospheric Composition Processing System (ACPS) evolved from the heritage processing systems currently processing ozone data at NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center. The ACPS includes complete provenance tracking of the various artifacts related to data processing. These include the data transformation algorithms and all data in the system, both inputs from external sources and data produced within the system. Other artifacts include the hardware and software of the processing framework, the source instruments and satellites, scientific literature and documentation, and people and organizations. The origin of any data or algorithms is recorded and the entire history of the processing chains are stored such that a researcher can understand the entire data flow. Provenance is captured in a form suitable for the system to provide basic scientific reproducibility of any data product it distributes even in cases where the physical data products themselves have been deleted due to space constraints. This paper will discuss the identification of provenance artifacts in the system and web services for communicating metadata about those provenance artifacts.