6 & 7 April 2009

Titania Hotel, 52, Panepistimiou Street -  Athens, Greece

PROGRAMME | CONCEPT PAPER

Today's e-Infrastructures provide online scientific communities with a viable means for large-scale, cross-domain collaboration, leveraged by their inherent ability to store and efficiently share huge volumes of distributed resources and data. In this context of global computing and integration, where new data sets are derived out of existing information at high rates, either manually or automatically, significant challenges are posed to the management, semantics assessment, and quality assertion of the shared data objects.

Data provenance provides a way to address the aforementioned challenges by enabling stakeholders to track down the origins of data, specify their purposes and explain their semantics. Moreover, when used together with interoperability, provenance facilitates data re-use and sharing, permits data to be discovered in context and allows their aggregation. Indeed, data provenance is of considerable value for all users, especially for scientists, and, to date, a number of provenance systems are already applied to various scientific domains, supporting data management in many ways.

This fifth BELIEF Brainstorming workshop, held in Athens 6th and 7th April with the support of the CASPAR Project, tackled the topic of Data Provenance and Authenticity. This was one of the most important outcomes of the 6th eConcertation meeting co-organised by the European Commission - DG INFSO/F3 GÉANT & e-Infrastructure Unit with the support of the BELIEF-II project, which took place on the 24th of November 2008 in Lyon, France.

The  workshop consisted of a mixture of presentations and discussions addressing several aspects around Provenance of Scientific Data: Authentication, Annotation, Archiving, etc. It aimed to tackle the issues above by bringing together participants from several disciplines and with different background and roles – scientists, end-users, librarians. The output of the workshop will be a report which intends to contribute to the drafting of the research agenda on the issues related to data provenance and standardization in e-Infrastructures.

An on-line survey on Data Provenance and Authenticity was available to address a number of issues related to attitudes and practices concerned with Authenticity and Provenance. The results were openly discussed at the event.