  Sharing provenance across workflow management systems automatically is not
currently possible, but the value of such a capability is high since it could
greatly reduce the amount of duplicated workflows, accelerate the discovery of
new knowledge, and verify the integrity of past and present analyses. Although
numerous technological challenges exist to efficiently share provenance
information across workflow management systems, permissioned distributed
ledgers could surmount many of them. The primary benefit of permissioned
distributed ledgers over other technologies is that their distribution is over
a peer-to-peer network that encodes transactions across the network into an
immutable hash list and achieves consensus on the validity of the new data
through a common consensus mechanism. This work discusses provenance and
distributed ledgers on their own and then presents an argument that distributed
ledgers naturally satisfy many of the requirements of workflow provenance, that
provenance information can exist in the ledger in multiple ways, and that a
number of novel research areas exist based on this strategy.
