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This paper investigates the development of data-usage graphs as a novel framework for assessing the trustworthiness of scientific data in AI research. By mapping the social and empirical evidence surrounding data usage, the authors propose a method to connect datasets with their historical context, including publications and methodologies, thereby enhancing the reliability of data for scientific inquiry. The findings highlight that trust in data can be cultivated through contextual history rather than mere popularity, offering a structured approach to discerning data fitness for purpose.
Trust in scientific data can be systematically built through contextual histories rather than just popularity metrics.
Artificial intelligence is changing the scale and tempo of scientific inquiry. Models can now search, integrate, and reason over data far beyond data repositories familiar to any individual researcher. Yet this expansion creates a prior problem: before a model can produce a trustworthy scientific result, it must locate data that are appropriate for the question, sufficiently reliable for the intended analysis, and accompanied by enough context to support responsible interpretation. As data becomes increasingly abundant, the challenge of finding data has been overcome by the challenge of finding data that you can trust. This paper explores how the social and empirical evidence that accumulates when data are used in research can be used, analogous to social trust networks, to determine fit for purpose and trust. Specifically, the paper explores data-usage graphs as a new layer of scientific data infrastructure. A data-usage graph connects datasets to the publications, people, institutions, topics, software, models, workflows, and other datasets through which they are produced and used. These connections reveal the {\it social life of data:} who has relied on a source, for which questions, in what combinations, with which methods, and with what observable impact. They can turn scattered traces of practice into data-usage descriptors that complement conventional metadata and support judgments of trust and fitness for purpose. The central claim is not that popularity establishes trust, but that this can be grown with appropriate contextual history. Usage evidence must therefore be combined with production quality, provenance, governance, semantic clarity, and community validation. The feasibility and value of data usage graphs is demonstrated by implementing the prototype data insights discovery service within the National Data Platform (NDP).
