Requirements for Provenance on the Web

From where did this tweet originate? Was this quote from the New York Times modified? Daily, we rely on data from the Web but often it is difficult or impossible to determine where it came from or how it was produced. This lack of provenance is particularly evident when people and systems deal with Web information or with any environment where information comes from sources of varying quality. Provenance is not captured pervasively in information systems. There are major technical, social, and economic impediments that stand in the way of using provenance effectively. This paper synthesizes requirements for provenance on the Web for a number of dimensions focusing on three key aspects of provenance: the content of provenance, the management of provenance records, and the uses of provenance information. To illustrate these requirements, we use three synthesized scenarios that encompass provenance problems faced by Web users today.

Designing Agent-Oriented Systems by Analysing Agent Interactions

We propose a preliminary methodology for agent-oriented software engineering based on the idea of agent interaction analysis. This approach uses interactions between undetermined agents as the primary component of analysis and design. Agents as a basis for software engineering are useful because they provide a powerful and intuitive abstraction which can increase the comprehensiblity of a complex design. The paper describes a process by which the designer can derive the interactions that can occur in a system satisfying the given requirements and use them to design the structure of an agent-based system, including the identification of the agents themselves. We suggest that this approach has the flexibility necessary to provide agent-oriented designs for open and complex applications, and has value for future maintenance and extension of these systems.

The Requirements of Using Provenance in e-Science Experiments

In e-Science experiments, it is vital to record the experimental process for later use such as in interpreting results, verifying that the correct process took place or tracing where data came from. The process that led to some data is called the provenance of that data, and a provenance architecture is the software architecture for a system that will provide the necessary functionality to record, store and use process documentation. However, there has been little principled analysis of what is actually required of a provenance architecture, so it is impossible to determine the functionality they would ideally support. In this paper, we present use cases for a provenance architecture from current experiments in biology, chemistry, physics and computer science, and analyse the use cases to determine the technical requirements of a generic, technology and application-independent architecture. We propose an architecture that meets these requirements and evaluate a preliminary implementation by attempting to realise two of the use cases.