Handling Traceability in Graph Fusion for a Trustworthy Framework

We previously developped InSyTo, a framework for soft and semantic information fusion and management relying on the conceptual graph formalism and ontologies. This framework was used in many projects. However, if the framework was well received by end-users, they highlighted an urgent need for traceability within the soft information fusion process. In this paper we propose an approach to provide traceability built-in capabilities to InSyTo. The approach relies on the use of conceptual graphs in order to express the history of each elementary piece of information as a lineage graph. The lineage graph contains all the historical information concerning the initial sources of each elementary information item, as well as the fusion operations that were applied on them. The main advantage of this new development is the ability of having a trustworthy framework and thus let the end-users know what, why and how somethings happens during the information process.