Declaratively Processing Provenance Metadata

Systems that gather fine-grained provenance metadata must process and store large amounts of information. Filtering this metadata as it is collected has a number of benefits, including reducing the amount of persistent storage required and simplifying subsequent provenance queries. However, writing these filters in a procedural language is verbose and error prone. We propose a simple declarative language for processing provenance metadata and evaluate it by translating filters implemented in SPADE, an open-source provenance collection platform.