Database Reference
In-Depth Information
equipped to capture the data produced by scientific applications. To amelio-
rate these concerns, scientists have begun to capture their work using elec-
tronic systems. While research on electronic notebooks abounds,
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,
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proba-
bly the most widely used system for recording lab notebook style information
electronically are Wikis.
*
Wikis provide a system for easily creating, modify-
ing, and collaborating on Web pages. For example, the Bradley Laboratory
and Drexel University post the protocols and results for the chemical solu-
bility experiments that they are performing on their Wiki.
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Similarly, the
OpenWetWare project
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provides a Wiki for the sharing and dissemination
of biological protocols. Available protocols range from definitions of how to
extract DNA from mouse tissue to setting up microarrays. The project has
over 3,000 registered users.
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A key piece of functionality is a Wiki's support for a revision history of
each page.
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This revision history provides a coarse view of the provenance
of a page. It provides information as to who edited the page, the time when
the page was modified, and the difference between the current state of the
page and its last revision. For OpenWetWare, the revision history enables
the tracking of a protocol's development and thus allows for the creation of
community protocols. Indeed, the ability to roughly determine the provenance
of a Wiki page is a key enabler to Open Access Science where scientists share
drafts of experiments, papers, and preliminary results online for others to
comment on and use.
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While a Wiki page's coarse provenance is useful, the revision history fails to
provide a comprehensive view of the provenance of a page because it does not
describe the process by which it was generated. Instead only the difference
between pages is known. For example, if a JPEG image added to a Wiki
page was produced by converting an image output from an image registration
algorithm applied to two other files, the revision history would be unable to
inform a scientist that JPEG conversion and image registration were involved
in the creation of the JPEG image. Thus, the provenance for the page is
incomplete. In many scientific applications, this sort of processing history
is required, and hence the provenance technologies discussed previously are
needed. We now discuss some of these applications.
12.6.2 Provenance in Geospatial Applications
Some of the first research in provenance was for geospatial systems in par-
ticular Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
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Knowing the provenance of
map products is critical in GIS applications because it allows one to deter-
mine the quality of those derived map products. In particular, Wang et al.
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highlights the need for systems to be able to isolate provenance of a specific
*
The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines
Wiki
as a type of web page designed so that its content
can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language.
