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Toward a Theory of Self-explaining Computation

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In Search of Elegance in the Theory and Practice of Computation

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8000))

Abstract

Provenance techniques aim to increase the reliability of human judgments about data by making its origin and derivation process explicit. Originally motivated by the needs of scientific databases and scientific computation, provenance has also become a major issue for business and government data on the Web. However, so far provenance has been studied only in relatively restrictive settings: typically, for data stored in databases or scientific workflow systems, and processed by query or workflow languages of limited expressiveness. Long-term provenance solutions require an understanding of provenance in other settings, particularly the general-purpose programming or scripting languages that are used to glue different components such as databases, Web services and workflows together. Moreover, what is required is not only an account of mechanisms for recording provenance, but also a theory of what it means for provenance information to explain or justify a computation. In this paper, we begin to outline a such a theory of self-explaining computation. We introduce a model of provenance for a simple imperative language based on operational derivations and explore its properties.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, UK

    James Cheney & Roly Perera

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, USA

    Umut A. Acar

  3. INRIA-Rocquencourt, France

    Umut A. Acar

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  1. James Cheney
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  2. Umut A. Acar
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  3. Roly Perera
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3330 Walnut St., 19104, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Val Tannen

  2. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 13 Computing Drive, 117417, Singapore, Singapore

    Limsoon Wong

  3. School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, EH8 9AB, Edinburgh, UK

    Leonid Libkin , Wenfei Fan  & Michael Fourman ,  & 

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of California, 1156 High Street, 95064, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Wang-Chiew Tan

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Cheney, J., Acar, U.A., Perera, R. (2013). Toward a Theory of Self-explaining Computation. In: Tannen, V., Wong, L., Libkin, L., Fan, W., Tan, WC., Fourman, M. (eds) In Search of Elegance in the Theory and Practice of Computation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8000. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41660-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41660-6_9

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