Tools for tracing evidence in social science

Evidence-based policy assessment requires evidence from a variety of sources (quantitative and qualitative) to be gathered and then synthesised to form an evaluation of a policy’s aims or outcomes. In this paper we argue that an appropriate provenance framework is an essential pre-requisite for any eSocial Science solution which aims to support such activities. Recent work applying provenance techniques to laboratory records in chemistry is reviewed, leading to a discussion of requirements for an equivalent infrastructure to support evidence bases in social science. Progress towards the development of such a provenance architecture is then described.