The availability of vast quantities of data through electronic archives has
transformed astronomical research. It has also enabled the creation of new
products, models and simulations, often from distributed input data and models,
that are themselves made electronically available. These products will only
provide maximal long-term value to astronomers when accompanied by records of
their provenance; that is, records of the data and processes used in the
creation of such products. We use the creation of image mosaics with the
Montage grid-enabled mosaic engine to emphasize the necessity of provenance
management and to understand the science requirements that higher-level
products impose on provenance management technologies. We describe experiments
with one technology, the "Provenance Aware Service Oriented Architecture"
(PASOA), that stores provenance information at each step in the computation of
a mosaic. The results inform the technical specifications of provenance
management systems, including the need for extensible systems built on common
standards. Finally, we describe examples of provenance management technology
emerging from the fields of geophysics and oceanography that have applicability
to astronomy applications.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure; Proceedings of Science, 201
