New Model to Trace the Origins of Information
University of Southampton (United Kingdom) (10/25/10) Joyce Lewis

A community of international researchers has developed a data model for tracing the origins of information and for sharing provenance details between systems. University of Southampton professor Luc Moreau says it is now possible to determine whether computer-generated data has been forged or altered.

Having an understanding of where data comes from will help users decide whether they want to trust the data. In 2006, Moreau launched the Provenance Challenge series, and the effort to exchange provenance between information systems has led to the design of the Open Provenance Model (OPM) and its revision in an open source community process.

“Provenance is well understood in the context of art or digital libraries, where it refers respectively to the documented history of an art object, or the documentation of processes in a digital object’s life cycle,” Moreau says.

“Interest in provenance in the e-science community is also growing, since it is perceived as a crucial component of workflow systems that can help scientists ensure reproducibility of their scientific analyses and processes.”