A Declarative Query Language for Data Provenance (Research Track)

Provenance has been widely studied in several different contexts and with respect to different aspects and applications. Although the problem of determining how provenance should be recorded and represented has been thoroughly discussed, the issue of querying data provenance has not yet been adequately considered. In this paper, we introduce a novel highlevel structured query language, named ProvQL, which is suitable for seeking information related to data provenance. ProvQL treats provenance information as a first class citizen and allows formulating queries about the sources that contributed to data generation and the operations involved, about data records with a specific provenance/origins (or with common provenance), and others. This makes ProvQL a useful tool for tracking data provenance information and supporting applications that need to assess data reliability, access control, trustworthiness, or quality.