Capturing provenance information in the file system

As business processes are increasingly complex, agile, and specialized, provenance information can improve interpretability and contextualization of process data. While individual process steps frequently employ digital computer files, their relationships within the overall process are rarely captured. To address this issue, we extend the factFUSE system for managing versioned Web resources in the file system to capture provenance relationships. By introducing an extensible commit system, we enable recording the relations between digital files and resources in process steps (activities), which are then captured as RDF metadata using the W3C PROV standard. Our evaluation shows that users without prior experience in provenance management successfully employ the system to capture semantic process provenance, attesting to excellent usability and promising utility. factFUSE is available for practical use under open source GNU AGPLv3 license.