Climategate: Open Provenance a way to prevent the lack of trust in data and modeling
The Trident workbench is only one way to create and present scientific workflow. To make sure that other scientific workflow systems are able to utilize other science or engineering modeling, a standard has been proposed.
You can find the document I am working from at: https://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18332/1/opm.pdf .
The high level requirements may look like:
The Open Provenance Model (OPM) is a model of provenance that is designed
to meet the following requirements:
- To allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, by
means of a compatibility layer based on a shared provenance model.- To allow developers to build and share tools that operate on such provenance
model.- To de ne provenance in a precise, technology-agnostic manner.
To support a digital representation of provenance for any \thing", whether
produced by computer systems or not.- To allow multiple levels of description to co-exist.
- To determine a core set of rules that identify the valid inferences that can be
made on provenance representation.
The idea is to not lock into any specific protocol, technology, etc. Rather, from my reading, it is to assist in solving problems like the inability to review older data such as the data from the Mariner Planetary Missions from the 1960s and onward. Other issues that could be improved such as the discussions around the reliability of the climate warming data.
Why is this important?
- Currently the media newsreaders and pundits would be able to have their staff examine the data and generate reasonable presentations using unbiased experts.
- Examination of data and reproducibility, important for proving the reliability of data and modeling would be simpler
- Science would once again be more approachable for the common person