data sharing

[Peter Rauch]

Thanks to Una for describing what an "audit trail" is. Regarding how it
can be used, I have a couple comments...

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Una Smith wrote:
> As I understand the term, "audit trail" has nothing to do with policy
> decisions,

On the other hand, I would argue that to make important (environmental,
for example) policy decisions based on data for which the reliability or
history is unknown and/or suspect, can be risky, and that the existence
of audit trails, to allow for some degree of enhanced confidence that
the data used are (still) valid (or at least, unchanged), is useful. To
that degree, audit trails and policy _are_ related.

> and there is a VAST amount of data to audit.

Indeed.

>  Actually, the only people
> who see this audit trail are the curators, not all users, and certainly
> not the general public.

If used data are to be well-understood (by the user), then I'd argue
that the audit trail for those data should be made available to the user
of the data.

Some might think that allowing the public to see their audit trails is
like hanging out their dirty laundry (!), but that's just a misguided
perception. The audit trail should be considered as a badge of
conscientious administration, with its goal to provide reliable
information of known history.
Peter