Presenting Provenance Based on User Roles - Experiences from the ACOS System
Abstract
One goal of provenance is to provide users an understanding of the steps a system took to generate data products. Here, the level of detail captured by provenance becomes an important consideration. As detail is added, more questions can be hypothetically addressed. However, presenting significant provenance detail may also overwhelm end users, for one of two reasons: (i) the detail presented is irrelevant to the objectives, or (ii) the detail requires background knowledge a user lacks. Both of these challenges are present for data generated by the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory’s (MLSO) Advanced Coronal Observing System (ACOS). In ACOS, photometer-based readings are taken of solar activity and subsequently processed into data products consumable by end users. To fully understand these sequences of steps, background knowledge corresponding to various areas (e.g., astronomy, digital imaging, and ACOS specific techniques) is required by end users. This makes reviewing provenance difficult for users outside the ACOS development team, where varying degrees of background may be expected (ranging from outside domain experts in Solar Physics to citizen scientists). Likewise, even when steps taken by ACOS are understandable, they may provide undesired detail to an end user if presented. The work with ACOS involved the development of a Semantic Web based framework to selectively present provenance detail for data products in ACOS. Here, provenance is captured according to two sets of ontologies, the Proof Markup Language, which is an ontology based domain-independent provenance model, and a step ontology, designed to capture hierarchies of provenance steps. Used in combination, these ontology sets enable the creation of multiple levels of provenance, ranging from coarse to fine grained detail. In this setting, users may choose to expand/collapse provenance steps to view desired details. However, the specific provenance details a user initially sees is defined through adoption of a given user role, defined through a role ontology, in which certain sets of background from the step ontology are assumed. In the context of ACOS, three user roles have been identified: ACOS expert, someone with complete background knowledge; outside domain expert, someone with knowledge in Solar Physics but not in ACOS-specific techniques; and citizen scientist, with only basic domain knowledge. We present how we have enabled browsing of provenance through a semantically enabled framework, defined through the two ontology sets. And we conclude by discussing that while developed with ACOS-based provenance in mind, domain independence is preserved in the framework itself - making it easily extensible to other eScience systems.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFMIN43C..05W
- Keywords:
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- 1958 INFORMATICS / Ontologies