PhD students Michael Gryk and Jessica Cheng and alumna Rhiannon Bettivia (PhD '16) organized a provenance workshop, which was held on February 17 in conjunction with the 15th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Dublin, Ireland.
The full-day workshop, Navigating through the Panoply of Provenance Metadata Standards useful for Digital Curation, covered a variety of established provenance metadata standards and controlled vocabularies useful in digital curation, including PREMIS, PROV, and PROV-ONE. The morning session introduced the capabilities and limitations of these metadata models. The afternoon session included hands-on breakout groups and interactive activities.
"We discussed and implemented these models using real-world research data, social media data (Twitter), and natural history museum collections by interactive activities as well as hands-on Python tutorials," Cheng said.
The workshop was an extension of work regarding provenance that has been in progress for several years in the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS).
"My own spin on provenance was inspired by the courses that Rhiannon taught at the iSchool on Digital Preservation and Metadata in Theory and Practice," said Gryk.
Gryk's research interests include scientific data management, computational reproducibility, data curation, workflows and provenance, and information organization, representation, and access. He presented a lightning talk at IDCC on PREMIS and PROV in the curation of scientific workflows. He also presented the paper, "Embedding Analytics within the Curation of Scientific Workflows," which he coauthored with Gerard Weatherby (UConn Health). Gryk earned his PhD in biophysics from Stanford University and MS in chemistry from the University of Connecticut.
Cheng's research interests lie at the intersection of information organization and data science methods. She is especially interested in topics related to knowledge organization, semantic web technologies, ontologies, and taxonomy alignment. Cheng earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in library and information science from National Taiwan University.
Bettivia is an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University. Her research blends information science with media, heritage, and cultural studies.
Workshop materials are available online.