The complicated network of trails 鈥撀爓hich can be traced backwards and forwards in time and space 鈥撀燼re the subject of Professor Luc Moreau鈥檚 inaugural lecture next Wednesday (19 October).
Professor Moreau鈥� of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS鈥揈lectronics and Computer Science鈥� is a leading expert in the area of Provenance鈥� an important area of computer science which makes a crucial contribution to issues of trust in computer-generated data by helping users understand the origins of data.
Provenance is important in many fields 鈥� for example in forensic examination of computer trails of information (surrounding issues of financial affairs and fraud), in health and medicine (the health and history of organs for transplantation), in science (the reliability of scientific data and the reproducibility of experimental results and observations), and in art, which has long been familiar with the idea of provenance, but which is now just as reliant on computer information for the history of objects as many other fields.
In 2006 Professor Moreau launched the Provenance Challenge series, an international, multidisciplinary activity, aiming to exchange provenance between information systems. He was one of the leaders of the EU Provenance Project, funded by the Sixth Framework Programme, and and along with a team of international researchers he has developed a new data model, the Open Provenance Model (OPM), designed to represent the provenance of information.
鈥淎 powerful argument for provenance is that it can help make systems transparent,鈥� said Professor Moreau. 鈥淥ur aim, with the community of researchers, is to establish a standard method to ascertain the provenance of information on the Web.鈥�
The lecture takes place in Nightingale Building (67) on the University鈥檚 Highfield Campus at 5 pm, with refreshments available from 4.30 pm. The lecture is open to the public (no tickets required) and all are welcome.