Provenance for Non-Experts

The flourish of data-intensive systems that are geared towards direct use by non-experts, such as Natural Language question answering systems and query-by-example frameworks calls for the incorporation of provenance management. Provenance is arguably even more important for such systems than for “classic” database application. This is due to the elevated level of uncertainty associated with the typical ambiguity of user specification (e.g. phrasing questions in Natural Language or through examples). Existing provenance solutions are not geared towards the non-experts, and the typical complexity and size of their instances render them ill-suited for this goal. We outline in this paper our ongoing research and preliminary results, addressing these challenges towards developing provenance solutions that serve to explain computation results to non-expert users.