The lifecycle of provenance metadata and its associated challenges and opportunities

This chapter outlines some of the challenges and opportunities associated with adopting provenance principles and standards in a variety of disciplines, including data publication and reuse, and information sciences

Dynamic Provenance for SPARQL Update

While the Semantic Web currently can exhibit provenance information by using the W3C PROV standards, there is a "missing link" in connecting PROV to storing and querying for dynamic changes to RDF graphs using SPARQL. Solving this problem would be required for such clear use-cases as the creation of version control systems for RDF. While some provenance models and annotation techniques for storing and querying provenance data originally developed with databases or workflows in mind transfer readily to RDF and SPARQL, these techniques do not readily adapt to describing changes in dynamic RDF datasets over time. In this paper we explore how to adapt the dynamic copy-paste provenance model of Buneman et al. [2] to RDF datasets that change over time in response to SPARQL updates, how to represent the resulting provenance records themselves as RDF in a manner compatible with W3C PROV, and how the provenance information can be defined by reinterpreting SPARQL updates. The primary contribution of this paper is a semantic framework that enables the semantics of SPARQL Update to be used as the basis for a 'cut-and-paste' provenance model in a principled manner.Comment: Pre-publication version of ISWC 2014 pape

The Role of Provenance Management in Accelerating the Rate of Astronomical Research

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

A greater share of the stomach? Role of provenance and ethical standards on consumers’ food choices and purchasing intentions

Purpose Provenance and ethical standards reflect foods that traceable and are supportive of the environment, sustainability and justice in the food supply chain. The aim of this study was to understand higher education consumers’ food choices and to examine the predictors of purchasing intention of food with provenance and ethical standards. Design/methodology/approach An online questionnaire was completed by 296 students and staff members of University of Central Lancashire. The questionnaire collected information on sociodemographic profiles; food choices, provenance and ethical standards; ethical purchasing and sourcing requirements and purchasing intention of food products with provenance and ethical standards. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the frequency of distribution of all sociodemographic characteristics. Multiple regression was used to examine if attitude, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) significantly predict the consumers’ purchasing intention (step 1). Exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the behavioural items using principal components estimation and varimax rotation. Multiple regression on the expanded TPB (step 2) using the obtained factor scores were conducted to determine if the factors were significant predictors of purchasing intention of food with provenance and ethical standards. Findings Multiple regression on the expanded TPB model revealed that only attitude and perceived behavioural control were significant predictors of purchasing intention of food with provenance and ethical standards. The regression model explained about 50% of the variance of the intent to purchase food with provenance and ethical standards where R2 = 0.50, (Adjusted R2 = 0.47). This was significantly different from zero F (5, 89) = 17.77, p < 0.001. The incorporation of ‘Preference for ethically sourced food and ‘Perceived knowledge and status of provenance standards’ did not increase the prediction of purchasing behaviour. Originality/value Two broad themes were identified from the factor analysis where the first factor prioritises ‘Preference for ethically sourced food’ and the second factor conceptualises ‘Perceived knowledge and status of provenance standards’. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was expanded to incorporate both factors but did not increase the prediction of purchasing intention. The authors recommend that other potential predictors e.g. moral concerns or perceived value of food with provenance and/or ethical standards to be tested using an extended TPB framework. The study is of value to higher and further education catering services to encourage more sustainable and local food consumption

Sharing interoperable workflow provenance: A review of best practices and their practical application in CWLProv

Background: The automation of data analysis in the form of scientific workflows has become a widely adopted practice in many fields of research. Computationally driven data-intensive experiments using workflows enable Automation, Scaling, Adaption and Provenance support (ASAP). However, there are still several challenges associated with the effective sharing, publication and reproducibility of such workflows due to the incomplete capture of provenance and lack of interoperability between different technical (software) platforms. Results: Based on best practice recommendations identified from literature on workflow design, sharing and publishing, we define a hierarchical provenance framework to achieve uniformity in the provenance and support comprehensive and fully re-executable workflows equipped with domain-specific information. To realise this framework, we present CWLProv, a standard-based format to represent any workflow-based computational analysis to produce workflow output artefacts that satisfy the various levels of provenance. We utilise open source community-driven standards; interoperable workflow definitions in Common Workflow Language (CWL), structured provenance representation using the W3C PROV model, and resource aggregation and sharing as workflow-centric Research Objects (RO) generated along with the final outputs of a given workflow enactment. We demonstrate the utility of this approach through a practical implementation of CWLProv and evaluation using real-life genomic workflows developed by independent groups. Conclusions: The underlying principles of the standards utilised by CWLProv enable semantically-rich and executable Research Objects that capture computational workflows with retrospective provenance such that any platform supporting CWL will be able to understand the analysis, re-use the methods for partial re-runs, or reproduce the analysis to validate the published findings.Submitted to GigaScience (GIGA-D-18-00483

Examining the Impact of Provenance-Enabled Media on Trust and Accuracy Perceptions

In recent years, industry leaders and researchers have proposed to use technical provenance standards to address visual misinformation spread through digitally altered media. By adding immutable and secure provenance information such as authorship and edit date to media metadata, social media users could potentially better assess the validity of the media they encounter. However, it is unclear how end users would respond to provenance information, or how to best design provenance indicators to be understandable to laypeople. We conducted an online experiment with 595 participants from the US and UK to investigate how provenance information altered users' accuracy perceptions and trust in visual content shared on social media. We found that provenance information often lowered trust and caused users to doubt deceptive media, particularly when it revealed that the media was composited. We additionally tested conditions where the provenance information itself was shown to be incomplete or invalid, and found that these states have a significant impact on participants' accuracy perceptions and trust in media, leading them, in some cases, to disbelieve honest media. Our findings show that provenance, although enlightening, is still not a concept well-understood by users, who confuse media credibility with the orthogonal (albeit related) concept of provenance credibility. We discuss how design choices may contribute to provenance (mis)understanding, and conclude with implications for usable provenance systems, including clearer interfaces and user education.Comment: Accepted to CSCW 202

Photometry and spectroscopy of faint candidate spectrophotometric standard DA white dwarfs

We present precise photometry and spectroscopy for 23 candidate spectrophotometric standard white dwarfs. The selected stars are distributed in the Northern hemisphere and around the celestial equators and are all fainter than r ~ 16.5 mag. This network of stars, when established as standards, together with the three Hubble Space Telescope primary CALSPEC white dwarfs, will provide a set of spectrophotometric standards to directly calibrate data products to better than 1%. These new faint standard white dwarfs will have enough signal-to-noise ratio in future deep photometric surveys and facilities to be measured accurately while still avoiding saturation in such surveys. They will also fall within the dynamic range of large telescopes and their instruments for the foreseeable future. This paper discusses the provenance of the observational data for our candidate standard stars. The comparison with models, reconciliation with reddening, and the consequent derivation of the full spectral energy density distributions for each of them is reserved for a subsequent paper.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures, 10 tables, ApJ in press (accepted on December 23rd, 2018

Semantic Modeling of Analytic-based Relationships with Direct Qualification

Successfully modeling state and analytics-based semantic relationships of documents enhances representation, importance, relevancy, provenience, and priority of the document. These attributes are the core elements that form the machine-based knowledge representation for documents. However, modeling document relationships that can change over time can be inelegant, limited, complex or overly burdensome for semantic technologies. In this paper, we present Direct Qualification (DQ), an approach for modeling any semantically referenced document, concept, or named graph with results from associated applied analytics. The proposed approach supplements the traditional subject-object relationships by providing a third leg to the relationship; the qualification of how and why the relationship exists. To illustrate, we show a prototype of an event-based system with a realistic use case for applying DQ to relevancy analytics of PageRank and Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS).Comment: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 9th International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC 2015

Expanding the Definition of Provenance: Adapting to Changes Since the Publication of the first AAM Guide to Provenance Research

In 2001 the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) published The AAM Guide to Provenance Research. However, in the past seventeen years there have been several new developments in the provenanceresearchfield, and an updated guide has yet to be released. I propose that several changes be made to create an updated version. For this project, I tested this guide in two ways: first, to see how our understanding of provenance has changed since 2001 and second, to use a case study to assess whether the recommended basic research guide and principles still apply to today. In the first section of this capstone, I review several of the significant changes that have influenced provenance research. I begin by examining the standards and ethics related to provenance, as determined by the museum field. I then observed how provenance has changed as it relates to legalchanges, both foreign and domestic; and developments of technologyand databases and theirinfluence on provenance. The focus of the next section is on basic provenance research guidelines and principles as outlined in the AAM Guide to Provenance Research. I tested how these practices withstand the changes in provenance several years after the guide’s publication, asking if the practices can be applied to works found in collectionsand if they can work within the shifting definition of provenance, which embraces the concept of a cultural biography of an object. My case study was part of a costume from the ballet Coppéliaperformed by the San Francisco Ballet found in the collection of the Museum of Performance + Design