Provenance in Engineering: Industrial perspectives on the provenance of design data
Citation
. 2009. ‘Provenance in Engineering: Industrial perspectives on the provenance of design data.’ In: E-Science Institute Workshop: Use Cases for Provenance in eScience. Edinburgh.
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Abstract
In industries such as aerospace, unexpected behaviour of products can have catastrophic consequences. Thus, when incidents of such behaviour occur, it is important to track down their cause to prevent re-ocurrence. While some incidents may be put down to in-service causes -- operator error, inadequate maintenance – some investigations must consider the details of the design and manufacture of the product. In such cases, investigators need to be sure that they have access to the genuine documentation for the product, and if they are to track down the root cause of the incident they must be able to trace the effects of design decisions and information transactions across the various pieces of evidence. The complexity of this task is frequently compounded by the fact that many product designs are adaptations of earlier designs. The possibility of design re-use has a further consequence that provenance has an additional role to play in the tracking of the intellectual property of an engineering organization.