Incorporating Data Provenance in a Medical CSCW System
Database and Expert Systems Applications - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference, DEXA 2010, volume 6261 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 315-322. Bilbao, Spain, Springer, (August 2010)Abstract
Medical research is a highly collaborative process in an interdisciplinary environment that may be effectively supported by a Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) system. Research activities should be traceable in order to allow verification of results, repeatability of experiments and documentation as learning processes. Therefore, by recording the provenance of data together with the collaborative context it is embedded into, novel types of provenance queries may be answered. We designed and implemented a next-generation CSCW system providing both the collaborative functionalities as well as the definition and execution of structured processes. We integrated a data provenance model recording process- and collaboration-related operations automatically and demonstrate the capabilities of the model by answering specific data provenance queries from the biomedical domain.
