Enabling rational decision making with provenance-annotated OSLC relationships

Architects create models to enable their stakeholders to proactively make rational decisions. The information stored in lifecycle management repositories is not only the contained collections of concepts but also the synthetic network of relationships between those concepts. Because Knowledge is justified true belief and stakeholders should not trust unjustified claims, architects have a responsibility to their stakeholders to provide justification for the relationships they make within their models. Today, modeling tools and notations only enable architects to make indefensible axiomatic relational claims. Therefore, with current lifecycle management repositories and tools, stakeholders cannot make rational decisions using their architects´ models. Provenance properties address stakeholders´ questions of Who did What, Where, When, and Why. While data without provenance is unsuitable for sound rational decision-making - because the claims in the data cannot be trusted - data combined with provenance transforms that data into justified information. A provenance-enabled Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration hub allows architects to augment their models with provenance, to provide the evidence and warrants of classical argumentation, to support rational decision-making. With such a provenance-tracking OSLC hub, architects can defend their otherwise axiomatic claims for all the creation, update, delete, and query accesses to the structural and behavioral resources and for the relational links between those resources.