A Provenance Enabled Framework for Subjectivity and Context

Cyberinfrastructure encompasses support for data acquisition, storage, management, integration, mining, and visualization over the Internet. Many scientific disciplines view cyberinfrastructure as necessary, if not essential, to enabling the derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge. The goals of cyberinfrastructure research include the sharing of data and results across institutions and disciplines and the enabling of seamless integration and analysis of information from these distributed data sources. With multiple information sources, each having potentially different contexts and different subjective interpretations, the explicit representation and specification of subjectivity and context are crucial and context-based reasoning is currently being actively developed. However, the discovery aspect of cyberinfrastructure, i.e., finding and assessing the relevance of existing information, has been identified as a difficult and outstanding problem. We present our work on a provenance enabled framework that includes semantically encoding the provenance of an information system and then dynamically discovering and comparing these provenance documents via software agents. An example from space physics is presented, in which similar information systems are discovered and the contextual provenance of each is presented to users.