Workshop on Data Derivation and Provenance - Chicago IL

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Provenance and data derivation are important to many aspects of scientific computation. In molecular biology, where data is repeatedly copied, corrected, and transformed as it passes through numerous genomic databases, understanding where data has come from and how it arrived in the user's database is of crucial to the trust a scientist will put in that data, yet this information is seldom captured properly. In astronomy, useful results may have been been obtained by filtering, transforming, and analyzing some base data by a complex assemblage of programs, yet we lack good tools for recording how these programs were connected and the context in which they were run. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity lies in the new insights that it will bring to the important topics of data provenance and data derivation. The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity relate primarily to the establishment of new ties between distinct disciplines that have strong interests in data derivation and provenance but have not, historically, talked to each other. These new ties will tend to accelerate both research and education in the participating disciplines.