Provenance

Provenance refers to the origin or source of an information (Munroe et al., 2006). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it may also refer to the history of the ownership or location of an object, especially when documented or authenticated. In policy development, provenance is used to provide evidence as to the views and background information for the creation of a public policy. In the OCOPOMO project, provenance is e.g. ensured through the establishment of traces and links between sources of information (the scenarios and background documents) provided by the stakeholders of a policy domain, and the simulation models developed by policy experts (Lotzmann and Wimmer, 2012). The links show the evolution of formal elements of a simulation model from the description of the real-world section (the scenarios and background documents, i.e. informal artefacts) which is subject of the model. Along the traces of a policy development process, two perspectives are important in policy modelling (see Lotzmann and Wimmer 2013):

• the perspective of the model developer, who is interested in traceability in order to understand or to keep track of the structure of the simulation model code,
• the perspective of the stakeholder not directly involved in model development, for whom provenance is essential in order to gain confidence in model results (and the simulation method as such) by unveiling the "black box" simulation model.

Related terms: Traceability, Evidence

References:

Munroe, S.; P. Groth; S. Jiang; S. Miles; V. Tan; J. Ibbotson; and L. Moreau. 2006. "Overview of the Provenance Specification Effort". University of Southampton Institutional Research Repository ePrints Soton

Ulf Lotzmann, Maria A Wimmer. Provenance and Traceability in Agent-based Policy Simulation. In: Proceedings of 26th European Simulation and Modelling Conference - ESM'2012, 2012

Ulf Lotzmann, Maria A. Wimmer. Traceability in evidence-based policy simulation. In: Webjørn Rekdalsbakken, Robin T. Bye, Houxiang Zhang (Editors) Proceedings of 27th European Conference on Modelling and Simulation (ECMS), 2013