Provenance structure in citizen science databases

Abstract

Today, more and more scientific groups are developing application for their purposes. Citizen science is relatively new domain of science that has already proved that it may be as beneficial as classical science. One of the major challenges citizen science constantly face is the data quality assurance. Several techniques are used to verify data quality – expert evaluation, voting systems, etc. That is where data provenance comes into play. Data provenance is used in many scientific systems and provides reliable mechanism for tracking data history. It includes history of origin, changes, and all interaction between different parts of data. Data provenance by itself has many types such as: “Why - provenance”, “Where - provenance”, and “How - provenance”. This research has produced a prototype of a database with built-in data provenance. Several databases systems and models have been taken into consideration. Several experiments have been made to test the limitations of proposed prototype.