The Identification Problem: A Description

Scientific data are often annotated based on their properties, which are not maintained during further data processing. Not maintaining annotations results in loss of information. Decisions made on such incomplete information may be wrong. In this paper the problem of propagating annotations along a data processing chain is formulated. In particular, an annotation of a data element is an identification that this data element exhibits a specific property. The propagation of this property from the input of an operation to its output is called the identification problem. In this paper the identification problem is described as a clustering problem.