SI2-SSI: Collaborative Research: Bringing End-to-End Provenance to Scientists

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Reproducability is the cornerstone of scientific progress. Historically, scientists make their work reproducible by including a formulaic description of the experimental methodology used in an experiment. In an age of computational science, such descriptions no longer adequately describe scientific methodology. Instead, scientific reproducibility relies on a precise and actionable description of the data and programs used to conduct the research. Provenance is the name given to the description of how a digital artifact came to be in its present state. Provenance includes a precise specification of an experiment's input data and the programs or procedures applied to that data. Most computational platforms do not record such data provenance, making it difficult to ensure reproducability. This project addresses this problem through the development of tools that transparently and automatically capture data provenance as part of a scientist's normal computational workflow. An interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and ecologists have come together to develop tools to facilitate the capture, management, and query of data provenance -- the history of how a digital artifact came to be in its present state. Such data provenance improves the transparency, reliability, and reproducibility of scientific results. Most existing provenance systems require users to learn specialized tools and jargon and are unable to integrate provenance from different sources; these are serious obstacles to adoption by domain scientists. This project includes the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of an end-to-end system (eeProv) that encompasses the range of activity from original data analysis by domain scientists to management and analysis of the resulting provenance in a common framework with common tools. This project leverages and integrates development efforts on (1) an emerging system for generating provenance from a computing environment that scientists actually use (the R statistical language) with (2) an emerging system that utilizes a library of language and database adapters to store and manage provenance from virtually any source. Accomplishing the goals of this proposal requires fundamental research in resolving the semantic gap between provenance collected in different environments, capturing detailed provenance at the level of a programming language, defining precisely aspects of provenance required for different use cases, and making provenance accessible to scientists.