Analytic Provenance for Sensemaking: A Research Agenda

Sensemaking is a process of finding meaning from information that often involves activities such as information foraging and hypothesis generation. It can be valuable to maintain a history of the data and reasoning involved. This history, commonly known as provenance information, can be a resource for "reflection-in-action"\´ during analysis, supporting collaboration between analysts, and can help trace data quality and uncertainty through the analysis process. Currently, there is limited work on utilizing analytic provenance, which captures the interactive data exploration and human reasoning process, to support sensemaking. This article presents and extends the research challenges discussed in a IEEE VIS 2014 workshop on this topic to provide an agenda for sensemaking analytic provenance.