Use Cases for Provenance – eScience Institute – 20 April

On Monday I am speaking as part of a meeting on Use Cases for Provenance (Programme), which has a lot of interesting talks scheduled. I appear to be last. I am not sure whether that means I am the comedy closer or the pre-dinner entertainment. This may, however, be as a result of the title I chose:

In your worst nightmares: How experimental scientists are doing provenance for themselves

On the whole experimental scientists, particularly those working in traditional, small research groups, have little knowledge of, or interest in, the issues surrounding provenance and data curation. There is however an emerging and evolving community of practice developing the use of the tools and social conventions related to the broad set of web based resources that can be characterised as “Web 2.0”. This approach emphasises social, rather than technical, means of enforcing citation and attribution practice, as well as maintaining provenance. I will give examples of how this approach has been applied, and discuss the emerging social conventions of this community from the perspective of an insider.

The meeting will be webcast (link should be available from here) and my slides will with any luck be up at least a few minutes before my talk in the usual place.