Electronically Querying for the Provenance of Entities

2010

FNT in Web Science

172

Provenance, i.e., the origin or source of something, is becoming an important concern, since it offers the means to verify data products, to infer their quality, to analyse the processes that led to them, and to decide whether they can be trusted. For instance, provenance enables the reproducibility of scientific results; provenance is necessary to track attribution and credit in curated databases; and, it is essential for reasoners to make trust judgements about the information they use over the Semantic Web.As the Web allows information sharing, discovery, aggregation, filtering and flow in an unprecedented manner, it also becomes very difficult to identify, reliably, the original source that produced an information item on the Web. Since the emerging use of provenance in niche applications is undoubtedly demonstrating the benefits of provenance, we contend that provenance can and should reliably be tracked and exploited on the Web, and we survey the necessary foundations to achieve such a vision.Using multiple data sources, we have compiled the largest bibliographical database on provenance so far. This large corpus allows us to analyse emerging trends in the research community. Specifically, using the CiteSpace tool, we identify clusters of papers that constitute research fronts, from which we derive characteristics that we use to structure our foundational framework for provenance on the Web. We note that such an endeavour requires a multi-disciplinary approach, since it requires contributions from many computer science sub-disciplines, but also other non-technical fields given the human challenge that is anticipated.To develop our vision, it is necessary to provide a definition of provenance that applies to the Web context. Our conceptual definition of provenance is expressed in terms of processes, and is shown to generalise various definitions of provenance commonly encountered. Furthermore, by bringing realistic distributed systems assumptions, we refine our definition as a query over assertions made by processes.Given that the majority of work on provenance has been undertaken by the database, workflow and e-science communities, we review some of their work, contrasting approaches, and focusing on important topics we believe to be crucial for bringing provenance to the Web, such as abstraction, collections, storage, queries, workflow evolution, semantics and activities involving human interactions.However, provenance approaches developed in the context of databases and workflows essentially deal with closed systems. By that, we mean that workflow or database management systems are in full control of the data they manage, and track their provenance within their own scope, but not beyond. In the context of the Web, a broader approach is required by which chunks of provenance representation can be brought together to describe the provenance of information flowing across multiple systems. This is the specific purpose of the Open Provenance Vision, which is an approach that consists of controlled voc...

Section: Provenance: a Query Over Process Assertionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Querying Provenancementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Foundations for Provenance on the Web

2010

FNT in Web Science

172

“…Querying consists of traversing the OPM DAG to produce a provenance graph pertaining to the data items of interest. A query is formed of a query data handle, which identifies the entity for which the provenance is sought, and the scope of traversal [13], which identifies what forms a relevant answer to the query (i.e. what parts of the OPM graph are of interest to the querier).…”

Section: Savedcivilianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Provenance of Decisions in Emergency Response Environments

Naja

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Rogers

2010

Abstract. Mitigating the devastating ramifications of major disasters requires emergency workers to respond in a maximally efficient way. Information systems can improve their efficiency by organizing their efforts and automating many of their decisions. However, absence of documenting how decisions were made by the system prevents decisions from being reviewed to check the reasons for their making or their compliance with policies. We apply the concept of provenance to decision making in emergency response situations and use the Open Provenance Model to express provenance produced in RoboCup Rescue Simulation. We produce provenance DAGs using a novel OPM profile that conceptualizes decisions in the context of emergency response. Finally, we traverse the OPM DAGs to answer some provenance questions about those decisions.

“…If provenance of data is available, processing becomes transparent since the provenance of data can be analysed against usage policies to decide whether processing was performed in compliance with such policies [1]. Information related to a specific processing can be obtained from provenance information by means of a provenance query [10], the result of which can be analysed to decide if the processing was performed in accordance with a set of usage policies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Provenance-Based Compliance Framework

Aldeco-Pérez

Future Internet - FIS 2010

2010

Abstract. Given the significant amount of personal information available on the Web, verifying its correct use emerges as an important issue. When personal information is published, it should be later used under a set of usage policies. If these policies are not followed, sensitive data could be exposed and used against its owner. Under these circumstances, processing transparency is desirable since it allows users to decide whether information is used appropriately. It has been argued that data provenance can be used as the mechanism to underpin such a transparency. Thereby, if provenance of data is available, processing becomes transparent since the provenance of data can be analysed against usage policies to decide whether processing was performed in compliance with such policies. The aim of this paper is to present a Provenance-based Compliance Framework that uses provenance to verify the compliance of processing to predefined information usage policies. It consists of a provenance-based view of past processing of information, a representation of processing policies and a comparison stage in which the past processing is analysed against the processing policies. This paper also presents an implementation using a very common on-line activity: on-line shopping 1 .