Southampton's Provenance Related Terminology

• Actor: An entity with a distinct identity capable of undertaking some autonomous action within a provenance system.
• Asserting Actor: An actor that creates (asserts) a p-assertion, which may subsequently be recorded in a provenance store.
• Interaction: The sending of a message by one actor and its receipt by another.
• Interaction Key: A globally unique identifier for an interaction.
• Interaction P-Assertion: An assertion of the contents of an interaction message by an actor that has sent or received that message.
• P-Assertion: An assertion that is made by an actor and pertains to a process.
• Process Documentation: A set of p-assertions made by the actors involved in a process.
• Provenance of item X: The process that led to X. Synonyms: UChicago-Retrospective Provenance.
• Provenance Query regarding item X: A query that finds (documentation of) items and events that caused X to occur. Synonyms: UPenn-Deep Provenance Query.
• Provenance Store: A repository dedicated to storing p-assertions created by asserting actors and allowing their subsequent retrieval by queries.
• Relationship P-Assertion: An assertion by an actor that the sending of a message would not be occurring or a data item it is sending would not be as it is (the effect), if it had not received other messages or data items had not been as they are(the causes), and that this relationship is due to its own action, expressible as the function applied to the causes to produce the effect.

-- SimonMiles - 4 Jan 2007
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