Data Provenance: Use Cases for the ESO archive, and Interactions with the Virtual Observatory

Abstract

In the Virtual Observatory era, where we intend to expose scientists (or software agents on their behalf) to a stream of observations from all existing facilities, the ability to access and to further interpret the origin, relationships, and processing steps on archived astronomical assets (their Provenance) is a requirement for proper observation selection, and quality assessment. In this article we present the different use cases Data Provenance is needed for, the challenges inherent to building such a system for the ESO archive, and their link with ongoing work in the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA).

4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX meeting (as P64), in the ASP Conference Series