Automating Provenance Capture In Software Engineering With Uml2prov

UML2PROV is an approach to address the gap between application design, through UML diagrams, and provenance design, using PROV-Template. Its original design (i) provides a mapping strategy from UML behavioural diagrams to templates, (ii) defines a code generation technique based on Proxy pattern to deploy suitable artefacts for provenance generation in an application, (iii) is implemented in Java, using XSLT as a first attempt to implement our mapping patterns. In this paper, we complement and improve this original design in three different ways, providing a more complete and accurate solution for provenance generation. First, UML2PROV now supports UML structural diagrams (Class Diagrams), defining a mapping strategy from such diagrams to templates. Second, the UML2PROV prototype is improved by using a Model Driven Development-based approach which not only implements the overall mapping patterns, but also provides a fully automatic way to generate the artefacts for provenance collection, based on Aspect Oriented Programming as a more expressive and compact technique for capturing provenance than the Proxy pattern. Finally, there is an analysis of the potential benefits of our overall approach.