Provenance: Information for Shared Understanding

Agile command and control (C2) systems allow users to draw upon diverse resources to solve complex problems. This paper describes data provenance technology being developed to support shared understanding of information and to better equip users to assess the suitability of shared information. We describe a provenance system, PLUS, and show how it can be used to assist in assessing trust and system quality. In addition, we describe novel and minimally invasive approaches to capture provenance automatically within distributed, heterogeneous C2 systems, and we compare the engineering costs and benefits of these approaches.