provenance, authorization, audit trails and licensing

Hi all,

 

In response to the availability of the second questionnaire, I am
getting some nice feedback (and what they expect to see coming out of
this workgroup).

1.       Will the provenance ontology provide a means for someone to
specify authorization? I know that has more to do with policies than
with provenance, but perhaps we can include some domain independent
elements to describe authorization associated with provenance? 

2.       Audit trails: who saw what, when and in which context - they
seem to want provenance to go beyond describing a process
transformation, but also who accessed things

3.       Licensing: there are situations in which datasets can be
unlocked when a license is provided/included. Can/should we use our
ontology to include this information?

 

Does anybody know of some ontologies that already combine both
(provenance and authorization; provenance and audit trails; provenance
and licensing)?

 

We can, perhaps consider devising the "provenance ontology" (PIF or
whatever it's going to be named) and provide also a set of extensions to
the core ontology. For example, one extension that covers authorization,
other one covering audit trails. What we want to avoid is people redoing
this work many times because they need it for their projects and we did
not deliver.  

 

Alternatively, we can decide that these are completely out of the scope
of provenance and identify the need for an "authorization" work group. 

 

Comments? Ideas? Worth discussing in the next telco?

 

Kind Regards,

Helena F. Deus

Post-doctoral Researcher
Digital Enterprise Research Institute

National University of Ireland, Galway

http://lenadeus.info