Effective Biosecurity Knowledge Management: A Provenance Perspective

Abstract

Biosecurity covers a full range of issues, from identifying and combating threats internationally, to border and post-border protection, right down to identifying and controlling pests at the farm, food-chain and export levels. The effectiveness of a biosecurity system relies on its ability to convene, share and discuss sensitive, current and real-time information about possible threats as early as possible. However, in Australia, at the state border level, most of interstate sale related data is collected in paper-based systems and distributed in various forms. This greatly hinders the process of effective information access and decision making. Provenance describes history of result including people, process and source data. By capturing, integrating and analysing digitised provenance information with domain knowledge, biosecurity information systems could provide better capabilities to access and analyse information for proper decision making. In this work, we introduce our current development on building a near-real-time knowledge management system by working with one of the six state biosecurity agencies in Australia, including the design and implementation of a knowledge model and a workflow to capture provenance information, and some initial provenance analysis.