A Standard Decision Format Using Provenance

Effective decision management is required to achieve a key goal of U.S. Military Strategy: Information Superiority. Effective management of decisions can be achieved by representing, measuring, tracking, storing and querying decisions using a standardized decision framework. The first step is to define a standardized format for representing decisions. In this paper, the authors suggest and explore the possibility that decisions can be considered the provenance of actions and, in that sense, can be represented using PROV, a World Wide Web Consortium standard for representing provenance. The authors provide an example and an overview of the proposed decision format with a decision framework utilizing this format to furnish the needed decision management capabilities. The authors further suggest that the time sequence of actors, activities and entities can be considered an instance of a decision "signal" amenable to traditional signal processing techniques for decision detection, modeling and prediction.