PMAF, a Pedigree Management and Assessment Framework

Warfighters need information that is both timely and trustworthy. New initiatives such as the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) and Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) have the goal of getting both “raw” and processed information to the warfighter as quickly as possible. In order to assess the trustworthiness of such information, the warfighter must be able to automatically check its provenance. In Phase I, ATC-NY developed a design of a Pedigree Management and Assessment Framework (PMAF) that shows the feasibility of using pedigrees in an information centric environment to support provenance evaluation. Key components include a model of information provenance, a run-time system, and a pedigree assessment tool. An important Phase I achievement was the development of an approach to maintain and retrieve provenance information that may depend on the type of the object. In particular, we have developed an approach using RDF that will allow a client to formulate appropriate queries. In Phase II, we will build a prototype and provide example schemas that illustrate the advantages of using PMAF.