Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Science Rendezvous > Posters
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Provenance: Promise and Practice

Ruth Duerr, Mark Parsons, Ron Weaver

CIRES

Capturing provenance is one of the fundamental principles of archive theory. Provenance consists of information about the creation of an object, its ownership, and how this information has changed over time. The data management community has been discussing how to apply the concepts of provenance to science data. Considerable attention has been paid to developing mechanisms to record how data were created, since this is key to reproducing research results. Less attention has been paid to the other elements of provenance, even though data and the organizations that archive data are dynamic and ever changing. Some practice is coming into play; but there is a large gap between theory and practice. This talk will review the current state of the art, discuss the gap between theory and practice, and describe what could be done to close the gap.