文章基本信息

标题：Causality and the Semantics of Provenance
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作者：James Cheney
期刊名称：Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
电子版ISSN：2075-2180
出版年度：2010
卷号：26
页码：63-74
DOI：10.4204/EPTCS.26.6
出版社：Open Publishing Association
摘要：Provenance, or information about the sources, derivation, custody or history of data, has been studied recently in a number of contexts, including databases, scientific workflows and the Semantic Web. Many provenance mechanisms have been developed, motivated by informal notions such as influence, dependence, explanation and causality. However, there has been little study of whether these mechanisms formally satisfy appropriate policies or even how to formalize relevant motivating concepts such as causality. We contend that mathematical models of these concepts are needed to justify and compare provenance techniques. In this paper we review a theory of causality based on structural models that has been developed in artificial intelligence, and describe work in progress on using causality to give a semantics to provenance graphs.