Principles of High Quality Documentation for Provenance: A Philosophical Discussion

Computer technology enables the creation of detailed documentation about the processes that create or affect entities (data, objects, etc.). Such documentation of the past can be used to answer various kinds of questions regarding the processes that led to the creation or modification of a particular entity. The answer to such questions is known as an entity's provenance. In this paper, we derive a number of principles for documenting the past, grounded in work from philosophy and history, which allow for provenance questions to be answered within a computational context. These principles lead us to argue that an interaction-based model is particularly suited for representing high quality documentation of the past.

Legal LEGO: Model based computer assisted teaching in evidence courses

This paper describes the development of a new approach to the use of ICT for the teaching of courses in the interpretation and evaluation of evidence. It is based on ideas developed for the teaching of science to school children, in particular the importance of models and qualitative reasoning skills. In the first part, we make an analysis of the basis of current research into “evidence scholarship” and the demands such a system would have to meet. In the second part, we introduce the details of such a system that we developed initially to assist police in the interpretation of evidence.