EDI Development Environment
Scientific data provenance is the information required to document the history of an item of data, including how it was created and how it was transformed. Data provenance has great potential to improve the transparency, reliability, and reproducibility of scientific results. However it has been little used to date by domain scientists because most systems that collect provenance require scientists to learn specialized software tools and jargon. This project is developing tools that allow scientists to collect, visualize, and query provenance directly from the R statistical language. The first tool (RDataTracker) is a library of R functions that can be downloaded and installed as an R package. RDataTracker allows the scientist to annotate (instrument) an R script in order to collect data provenance at the desired level of detail. The resulting provenance is stored on the scientist's computer as a DDG (data derivation graph) file in text format. The second tool (DDG Explorer) is a stand-alone Java program that can be downloaeded and run as an executable Java archive (jar) file. DDG Explorer allows the scientist to visualize, store, and query DDG files. Documentation for both tools is included in the RDataTracker installation file.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
