The Southampton Provenance Initiative

The Southampton Provenance Initiative is an umbrella project for coordinating the research effort, at the University of Southampton and beyond, seeking to explore the concepts and issues related to provenance in computer systems.

The vision is:

In the study of fine art, provenance refers to the documented history of some art object. Given such a documented history, the object attains an authority that allows scholars to understand and appreciate its importance and context relative to other works. Art objects without a proven history may be treated with some skepticism by those who study and view them.

Transposing such ideas to the IT world, if the provenance of data produced by computer systems could be determined as it can for some works of art, then users would be able to understand how documents were assembled, how simulation results were determined, how financial analyses were carried out, or what causes information to be displayed on Web pages. Thus, to accomplish such a vision, computer applications need to be transformed into what we term provenance-aware applications, for which the provenance of data may be retrieved, analysed and reasoned over.

-- LucMoreau - 29 Sep 2006
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