It's About the Data: Provenance as a Tool for Assessing Data Fitness

The end goal of provenance is to assist users in understanding their data: How was it created? When? By whom? How has it been manipulated? In other words, provenance is a powerful tool to help users answer the question, "Is this data fit for use?" However, there is no one set of criteria that make data "fit for use". The criteria depend on the user, the task at hand, and the current situation. In this work we describe Fitness Widgets, predefined queries over provenance graphs that users can customize to determine data fitness. We describe our implementation of Fitness Widgets in our provenance system, PLUS.