When a piece of information is put out into the world it gets subjected to many attempts, both accidental and deliberate, to degrade it or tamper with it. When we are dealing with precious information, that is information which has value (cultural, monetary, scientific etc.), then having assurance that the information has stayed constant is vital. When that information is not kept hidden or otherwise protected then this becomes a very hard problem. It may even be insoluble. The general problem of computing with and reasoning about such information is part of the Veracity Project (veracity.wgtn.ac.nz), funded by SfTI (sftichallenge.govt.nz) in New Zealand.

This talk traces the initial stages of development, from first principles, of a formal logic to characterise and then explore issues concerning a broadly defined idea of ``veracity''.

Veracity seems to be a term that is widely used, but it is also hard to pin-down its meaning. In this work I am taking it to mean, reflecting the concerns above, that we have an assurance that the information has retained original form. So, we say a piece of information has veracity when we can check that it has not changed (as a starting point).

Since veracity as a term seems to have many meanings, my view is that there is piece of work that we can do that would be valuable concerning giving a a logical basis for the term that we can argue for, and then once formalised we can explore the idea of veracity to see if the formalisation has useful, relevant properties on actual problems that we come across int he wider Veracity Project.

This work has the following steps: we take veracity to comprise in authenticity, truth, trust, demonstrability/verifiability; we try to pin down and then explore in a logical setting what this all means; we thus attempt to formalise as much of veracity as we can in order to better understand what is is and the way it works.

I will scratch the surface of all this in the talk.

Professor Steve Reeves is the Head of the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

His research is on Formal Methods, including the Z Language, general forms of refinement, and the specification of interactive systems. More recently, he also works on blockchain and indigenous IT.