Re: ACTION-152: Trim to write a paragraph mot ivating needs for provenance (Provenance Working Group)

I've been working through Action 152 and have come up with 6 use cases, and
extended summaries for two of them.  This is still a work in progress, and
I welcome feedback.  Thanks!

Use Case Types:
1. Risk Management (Compliance and Reputation)
1. Health Care (Finding contradictory / complementary findings on the same
topic in medical text)
2. Epistemological Bias (Bias in scientic / research texts)
3. Expert Systems (Notions of trust and confidence in ingested data)
4. Supply Chain (source of ingredients)
5. Social Business (trust, confidence, reputation)
6. General Ledger (greater tranparency for auditing)

Use Case Summaries:

1. Compliance Risk (a type of Risk Management):

   What is Compliance Risk?

   Companies are subject to a wide range of rules and regulations that
   apply directly to their internal operations and the products and
   services they provide. Compliance to these regulations are essential for
   a company to operate transparently and ethically in their particular
   markets. They are required to prove compliance to the imposed
   regulations through internal and external auditing processes .

   These processes are usually manual where the auditors sample and inspect
   the process documentation generated by the company being audited. This
   is both time consuming and potentially subject to error. Applying the
   Provenance architecture and methodology to business processes as they
   execute has the potential to improve the quality of the auditing
   processes, improve the transparency of a company’s compliance to the
   regulations and provide cost benefits which impact profitability.

   How can Provenance help?

   The question of whether (or how) the content of a particular electronic
   document has changed since its creation is very much an integrity
   question in the security world; it is equally well a proper question for
   the analysis for a document’s provenance .

   An assessment of the trustworthiness of information sources and the
   products derived from them is of fundamental importance.  Not only is
   the trustworthiness of a source of interest, but the way in which
   information changes as it is processed and disseminated between people
   and groups .

4. Supply Chain:

   Suppose I had an app on my mobile phone which I could take to a
   supermarket and could scan the barcode of a product.  From that, I could
   get a history of its creation.  I might now want to know all the details
   as a consumer, but for a given soup I could scan the barcode and know
   when and where the ingredients were manufactured.

5. Social Business

   Finding experts, trust relationships and reputation - goes beyond
   LinkedIn concept of a 1st relationship.  Provenance can be used to see
   who interacts, how frequently that interaction occurs, when and where,
   etc.

6. General Ledger

   The General Ledger is the core component of any company’s accounting
   system. It contains the set of “books” containing records of all the
   financial transactions that flow through the company and therefore
   provides a permanent record of the financial history of the company. The
   General Ledger may contain other sub-ledgers for items such as cash,
   accounts receivable and accounts payable. All entries posted to these
   sub-ledgers will be reconciled and visible through the General Ledger
   account. The set of financial transactions contained within the General
   Ledger are periodically audited by external auditors who then certify
   the financial health of a company; the company is then able to report
   its financial results to external investors.

   In addition to the transactions recorded in a General Ledger, companies
   must also describe the processes they use to update entries in the
   General Ledger. These transparency requirements are imposed to combat
   fraudulent transactions that may influence a company’s financial state.
   In this case, an auditor has not only to certify the accounts of a
   company but also the processes used by the company in generating the
   accounts.

   Enabling provenance would require the following information items within
   a Provenance data model:
   1. Identifiers for each General Ledger transaction
   2. The roles and identities of users preparing, approving and posting
   the General Ledger transactions
   3. Timestamps recording when the individual process steps took place
   4. Codes confirming that each process step completed satisfactorily
   5. For security and protection against tampering, the Provenance
   documentation can be cryptographically signed

   With provenance enabled in the process, an auditor may pose the
   following types of queries:
   1. For a particular transaction in the General Ledger, did the users
   approving the transaction have sufficient authority?
   2. Were the defined steps in the accounting process followed
   sequentially?
   3. Were the supporting documents for a particular transaction approved
   at the correct time?
   4. Are there any transactions in the General Ledger that were inserted
   that did not follow the necessary process?
   5. Have any transactions been altered since they were first entered into
   the General Ledger?


-Craig



From: Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org>
To: Craig M Trim/Costa Mesa/IBM@IBMUS,
Date: 11/10/2012 01:41 PM
Subject: ACTION-152: Trim to write a paragraph mot ivating needs for
            provenance (Provenance Working Group)



ACTION-152: Trim to write a paragraph mot?ivating needs for provenance
(Provenance Working Group)

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/actions/152


On: Craig Trim
Due: 2012-11-17

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