Cheney, JamesChong, StephenFoster, NateSeltzer, MargoVansummeren, Stijn2011-11-162009Cheney, James, Stephen Chong, Nate Foster, Margo Seltzer, and Stijn Vansummeren. 2009. Provenance: a future history. In Proceeding of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference companion on object oriented programming systems languages and applications. New York, NY: ACM.978-1-60558-768-4http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:5346327Science, industry, and society are being revolutionized by radical new capabilities for information sharing, distributed computation, and collaboration offered by the World Wide Web. This revolution promises dramatic benefits but also poses serious risks due to the fluid nature of digital information. One important cross-cutting issue is managing and recording provenance, or metadata about the origin, context, or history of data. We posit that provenance will play a central role in emerging advanced digital infrastructures. In this paper, we outline the current state of provenance research and practice, identify hard open research problems involving provenance semantics, formal modeling, and security, and articulate a vision for the future of provenance.en-USConference Paper2011-11-1610.1145/1639950.1640064