Provenance and Privacy in ProSA A Guided Interview on Privacy-Aware Provenance

Consciously collecting (research) data and respecting privacy aspects are two contradictions, which seem to be mutually exclusive at first moment. However, this does not have to be the case. But before we can address this conflict and its resolution, we want to understand what the terms privacy, provenance, and research data management actually mean. We are not interested in the formal definitions but in the community's understanding of these terms. We have the intention to explore how far the theoretical definitions are known in science and economy. Hence, we interviewed 20 people - scientists and non-scientists - and evaluated their answers for discussing the relevance of combining provenance and privacy in the field of research data management. We discovered that provenance is generally understood as the origin of data or physical objects, and privacy often refers to the protection of personal data. We found that all participants have a very good understanding of their own research data, which in most cases is based on a well-developed research data management. Nevertheless, there is still some uncertainty, especially in the area of provenance and privacy.