Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationServing as a record of what happened during a scientific process, often computational, provenance has become an important piece of computing. The importance of archiving not only data and results but also the lineage of these entities has led to a variety of systems that capture provenance as well as models and schemas for this information. Despite significant work focused on obtaining and modeling provenance, there has been little work on managing and using this information. Using the provenance from past work, it is possible to mine common computational structure or determine differences between executions. Such information can be used to suggest possible completions for partial workflows, summarize a set of approaches, or extend past work in new directions. These applications require infrastructure to support efficient queries and accessible reuse. In order to support knowledge discovery and reuse from provenance information, the management of those data is important. One component of provenance is the specification of the computations; workflows provide structured abstractions of code and are commonly used for complex tasks. Using change-based provenance, it is possible to store large numbers of similar workflows compactly. This storage also allows efficient computation of differences between specifications. However, querying for specific structure across a large collection of workflows is difficult because comparing graphs depends on computing subgraph isomorphism which is NP-Complete. Graph indexing methods identify features that help distinguish graphs of a collection to filter results for a subgraph containment query and reduce the number of subgraph isomorphism computations. For provenance, this work extends these methods to work for more exploratory queries and collections with significant overlap. However, comparing workflow or provenance graphs may not require exact equality; a match between two graphs may allow paired nodes to be similar yet not equivalent. This work presents techniques to better correlate graphs to help summarize collections. Using this infrastructure, provenance can be reused so that users can learn from their own and others' history. Just as textual search has been augmented with suggested completions based on past or common queries, provenance can be used to suggest how computations can be completed or which steps might connect to a given subworkflow. In addition, provenance can help further science by accelerating publication and reuse. By incorporating provenance into publications, authors can more easily integrate their results, and readers can more easily verify and repeat results. However, reusing past computations requires maintaining stronger associations with any input data and underlying code as well as providing paths for migrating old work to new hardware or algorithms. This work presents a framework for maintaining data and code as well as supporting upgrades for workflow computations

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media. I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving. The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged. Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems. From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication. Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments. Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers. The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data. Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information. Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud). Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Knowledge Sharing, Maintenance, and Use in Online Support Communities.

Widespread adoption of information technologies has fostered new social arrangements and opportunities for large-scale collaboration. Many of these new collaborations occur in online support communities where members help each other make sense of, and deal with, a particular topic (e.g., website design, cancer treatment). Many of these communities struggle with meeting the divergent needs of novices, experts, and those who overhear their conversations. A few communities have recently augmented their existing threaded conversations (e.g., email list discussions) with a wiki repository which serves a similar purpose as an FAQ document. I demonstrate how a threaded conversation and wiki repository can complement each other by describing in detail a technical support community (css-d) where they do. Using a mixed method approach I empirically examine how activity is organized to leverage both resources through an analysis of the governance structure, social roles and norms, information genres, participation patterns, and technical features. I also use an action research methodology to help 3 online medical support communities implement a wiki repository. I first the limitations of using a community conversation for reuse by arguing that the very same characteristics that make community conversations useful to their participants (e.g., their personalized, immediate, and social nature) make their reuse by onlookers problematic. I then describe how a wiki repository was used by the css-d community to create reusable content that complements the discussion. I characterize the wiki genres most useful to the community (e.g., Annotated Links, Debate summaries, How To pages, Articles) and describe the processes important to their creation, and how they lead to content that fills information gaps, is reusable, and relevant to the masses. I describe how the synergistic relationship between community conversation and wiki repositories helps overcome some of the information sharing and maintenance challenges common to help-based communities, as well as how it helps overcome some of the common social maintenance challenges of online communities such as keeping the discussion on topic and avoiding contentious debates. Finally, I characterize some of the challenges of implementing wiki repositories and collaborative authoring, such as the hesitancy of members to edit others’ work.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57608/2/shakmatt_1.pd