Where did you hear that?

Information and the Sources They Come From

James P. McCusker,1 Timothy Lebo,1 Li Ding,1 Cynthia Chang,1 Paulo Pinheiro da Silva,2 and Deborah L. McGuinness1

1Tetherless World Constellation2CyberShARE Center, University of Texas at El Paso

Linked Science 2011, Bonn, Germany

Background

To do Linked Science, you need to know where your data comes

from.

Many studies show people will not use the applications if they do not have access to the information relied on

Studies done for DARPA (CALO), IARPA (NIMD), NSF (VSTO), AT&T (PROSE & FindUR), …

Selected Dimensions of Provenance

Derivational Provenance•x derived_from y using rule z•agent initiated and controlled process•process used x•y generated_by process•subprocess triggered_by process

This work came from our work on provenance languages and their environments, in particular on PML: Proof Markup LanguageAndInference WebAnd nowPROV: Provenance Model (W3C, in progress)

One perspective on Abstractive Provenance:•Work•Expression•Manifestation•ItemFRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic ReferencesPROV: wasComplementOf

Exploring in another area of Cell Lines vs. Cell Line Colonies

FRBR Stack for PML Primer

WorkThe web page URL.

ExpressionThe page content

ManifestationThe bytes that were downloaded.

ItemThe specific physical copy.

Information, Source, SourceUsage in PML

PML provides an explicit mechanism for linking Information to its Source.

Includes:

• Location (URI)

• Date of access

• Extraction method (file offsets, cell contents, etc).

Why FRBR for Information Sources?

Work – SourceExpression – Abstract InformationManifestation – Concrete InformationItem – Specific Copy

These constructs can be reused for other provenance:• File copy• Format conversion• Reproducibility

Source and Information in FRBR

Discussion

• Abstractive + derivational provenance is really powerful.• Ability to identify content regardless of format and across

multiple copies of data.• Reproducibility is verifiable across different file formats and

algorithms as long as the Expressions are the same.• We have found that FRBR generalizes to information

resources.• Could be considered FRIR (Functional Requirements for

Information Resources)• We’ve implemented it in our LOGD converter

(csv2rdf4lod).• Maintain content links (same Expression) even when

manually changing the data, like converting Excel to CSV.• Particularly useful in much of our Linked Open Data work.

Conclusions

• Any serious provenance model for linked science must provide a mechanism for describing information sources and their usage.– Achieved with modeling primitives in PML.

• Abstractive + derivational provenance can express nuanced explanations of data access, transformation, and analysis.

• Links from information to source can be modeled using a combination of FRBR and a derivational provenance model.– Allows for unambiguous descriptions of data and

information access and transformation.

Questions?

Thanks!

Also, come to SemantAqua demo on Tues and talk on Wed aft. 5:30

The Tetherless World Constellation is partially funded by DARPA, U.S. Department of Energy, Fujitsu, LGS, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft Research,

NASA, National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the National Science Foundation, Qualcomm, and the Woods Hole Oceonographic

Institution (WHOI). This research was partially funded by the National Science Foundation under CREST Grant No. HRD-0734825.

Source, Information, and SourceUsage in PML

Implementation: pcurl.py

Part of csv2rdf4lod:$ pcurl.py --help

usage: pcurl.py [--help|-h] [--format|-f xml|turtle|n3|nt] [url ...]

Download a URL and compute Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Resources (FRBR) stacks using cryptograhic digests for the resulting content.

Refer to http://purl.org/twc/pub/mccusker2012parallel for more information and examples.

optional arguments:

url url to compute a FRBR stack for.

-h, --help Show this help message and exit.

-f, --format File format for FRBR stacks. One of xml, turtle, n3, or nt.