Automatically Adapting Source Code to Document Provenance

Abstract

Being able to ask questions about the provenance of some data requires documentation on each influence on that data's existence and content. Much software exists, and is being developed, for which there is no provenance-awareness, i.e. at best, the data it outputs can be connected to its inputs, but with no record of intermediate processing. Further, where some record of processing does exist, e.g. as logs, it is not in a form easily connected with that of other processes. We would like to enable compiled software to record useful documentation without requiring prior manual adaptation. In this paper, we present an approach to adapting source code from its original form without manual manipulation, to record information on data provenance during execution.