Principles of High Quality Documentation for Provenance: A Philosophical Discussion Paul Groth, Simon Miles, Steve Munroe University of Southampton

Where’s the shirt from? From Calvin Klein Heh! That’s not true. I gave that to you as a gift and I bought it myself at Walmart for $19.99

Some Background We consider software systems Software components are called actors Actors document “what they do” Users can query this documentation (process documentation) to answer questions about the provenance of data items.

Why Principles for Provenance? Massively distributed applications Data lasts along time Users may be different than those expected

Why Principles for Provenance? Massively distributed applications Data lasts along time Users may be different than those expected What are the fundamental expectations that users can have about documentation when asking provenance questions?

What historians want Why historians? They ask a lot of provenance questions. Good Sources (M. Stanford) –Sources are documentation or artifacts –Are accurate. They represent what actually occurred in the world. –Have authors. The historian knows who was responsible for the information source. This makes it easier to understand the source.

Recording source material Our systems should be good sources for historians and users. To ensure that our systems produce documentation that is accurate and has authorship, we introduce two principles. –Factuality –Attribution

Factuality As part of documentation of the past, actors must only record information that they can verify to be true, where truth is defined by the correspondence theory of truth. Simply, actors should record what they observe not guess or infer.

Attribution Each statement making up documentation of the past for a computer system must be attributable to a particular actor. Attribution allows users to interpret and judge documentation.

High Quality Documentation High quality documentation is documentation that is factual and attributable. It provides a firm basis for answering provenance questions. Users know what to expect from such documentation.

Enforcement Our data model (the p-structure) for documentation specifically supports these principles. The protocol for recording process documentation (PReP) enforces the principles. –Attribution is supported through a requirement for signatures. –Types provide a framework that supports factuality.

Conclusion The systems we have designed enforce the principles presented here. It is important to state the underlying principles that systems use to generate documentation of the past to the user community. Users then know how to best interpret and und use the documentation to answer their provenance questions.

What do you think? - Are these the right principles? - Are there other principles? - Is this useful at all? Paul Groth