Doctoral candidate Michael Gryk successfully defended his dissertation, "Explorations in Provenance in the Information Sciences," on May 3.
His committee included Professor Bertram Ludäscher (chair); Professor J. Stephen Downie; Professor Michael Twidale; and Rhiannon Bettivia, assistant professor of library and information science at Simmons University.
Abstract: Provenance is important throughout Library and Information Science and is particularly important for the information infrastructures which support the computational aspects of the natural sciences. This is highlighted by the prominence of provenance as a plank in the FAIR principles for data stewardship (principle R1.2). While traditionally focused on the history/lineage of physical objects, provenance is commonly accepted to apply to digital objects such as the results of computation as well as to the recipes for computing; in the case of recipes this prospective provenance is critical for reproducibility. This dissertation includes attempts to FAIRify the reporting and execution of workflows within a domain of natural science for better data stewardship to support both data reuse and reusability; as well as proposing that there remains a gap in our ability to fully document provenance as there are more story-telling tenses than just the past (retrospective) and future (prospective). There is also the subjunctive (conditional) and perhaps many others. Supporting new flavors of provenance requires new modeling constructs which are described in the final chapters.