Today, there is an increasing demand to capture provenance in the whole life cycle of remotely sensed geoscience data from acquisition, archival, processing, distribution, to applications and make the provenance information available to user community. The complete and accurate provenance information can bring transparency to data sharing and geoscientific processing, give credit to data and algorithm contributors, make scientific results reproducible and trustworthy, and support advanced data quality analysis. Motivation for capturing and sharing provenance also comes from the distributed data and information infrastructure that has been benefitting the Earth science community in the last decade, such as Spatial Data and Information Infrastructure, e-Science, and Cyberinfrastructure. Traditionally, Earth science data products are produced in the scientific data centers with pre-established processing steps or workflows. In the distributed information infrastructure, data and high-level information products are generated, transformed, published, and disseminated frequently by a broad community of scientific users. In such a data-rich production environment, provenance information is even more important, since scientists rely on the provenance to understand and determine the reliability and usability of a scientific product generated from distributed services and inputs provided by various providers.
Contributions for this special issue are welcome from the research community. The technology covered by this special issue will include latest developments of provenance awareness in all aspects of remote sensing data archiving, information management, search and access, and specialized services for data users, such as on-demand processing and visualization. Enabling technologies such as data management, Cyberinfrastructure, workflow, high performance computing, error propagation, Semantic Web, evolving standards, security, and Web services will be involved. The emphasis will be on the approaches using those technologies to address such issues as provenance capture, representation, storage, query, and usage for understanding, management, traceability, and quality analysis of the diverse Earth remote sensing data and processing flow. The special issue will include, but not be limited to, the following set of topics:
1. Provenance-aware geoscientific data system architecture;
2. Geospatial provenance models for heterogeneous geoscientific data;
3. Provenance and geospatial metadata;
4. Provenance and geoscientific workflow;
5. Provenance and Geo-Cyberinfrastructure;
6. Provenance capturing in Earth science data and sensor systems;
7. Geoscience data provenance management including storage, query, and dissemination of the provenance;
8. Interoperability approaches for sharing geoscience data provenance;
9. Geoscience data provenance visualization and navigation;
10. Provenance applications in geoscience such as geoscientific data quality evaluation and trust analysis.