Provenance and Volunteered Geographic Information

摘要: Provenance (also called lineage) is metadata about an object's origin and history (Bose Frew, 2005.) The term conventionally applied to works of art, whose provenance the documented chain custody object, from creator current custodian. Reliable (assurance that object has never been without reliable custody) a necessary precondition for establishing artwork's authenticity. For information, notion broadens include transformations between information's origins its form. (One can think artwork as special case where change in equates identity transformation.) In my own work data-intensive Earth science, typical processing sequence includes: data acquisition by satellite remote sensing system, formatting, calibration, projection, subsetting, re-projection, analysis; end product being quantized field representing some surface phenomenon such snow cover or ocean color. products conceptually directed acyclic graph leading back through intermediate original ancillary data. Note this be traversed either direction; i.e., one determine both "ancestors" "descendants" any particular (e.g., file) transformation instance program invocation.) scientific information exploited answer common, non-trivial questions. example, forward (descendant) identify were derived, however indirectly suspect miscalibrated) source Backward (ancestor) used help source(s) observed anomalies product. I assume will useful, perhaps even critical, broader acceptance utilization volunteered geographic (VGI), three reasons. First, collected manipulated nonspecialists more likely contain unnoticed errors biases. If when these biases are discovered, document (and thus mitigate consequences of) their propagation. Second, substitute other missing incorrect metadata, identifying antecedent objects which may inherited. And finally, humans institutions involved creation manipulation, provide foundations judgments quality trust. Supplying manually tedious, like most human-created it usually distinguished absence. A conspicuous, if partial, exception rule is, course, article citations, constitute weak form assumed references all way ancestral referring document. twin motivations integrity professional advancement ensure consistently supplied. however, since nature not explicitly specified; we state