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

Hi Tim,

That's a good question.  I don't think we had any conclusion there.  The
target audience are potential adopters, so the overview document might make
sense.

-Craig



From:	Timothy Lebo <lebot@rpi.edu>
To:	Craig M Trim/Costa Mesa/IBM@IBMUS,
Cc:	Provenance Working Group <public-prov-wg@w3.org>
Date:	11/20/2012 11:37 AM
Subject:	Re: ACTION-152: Trim to write a paragraph mot ivating needs for
            provenance  (Provenance Working Group)



Craig,

The descriptions are very nice.

Apologies, but it was a long F2F... what is the target for this writeup? Is
it for the Overview document?

Regards,
Tim


On Nov 20, 2012, at 11:00 AM, Craig M Trim <cmtrim@us.ibm.com> wrote:



      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

      <graycol.gif>Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker ---11/10/2012
      01:41:35 PM---ACTION-152: Trim to write a paragraph mot