2016s

Tracking workflow execution with TavernaProv 2016-05-09

• Workflows
• Provenance
• Research Object
• Reproducibility

Apache Taverna is a scientific workflow system for combining web services and local tools. Taverna records provenance of workflow runs, intermediate values and user interactions, both as an aid for debugging while designing the workflow, but also as a record for later reproducibility and comparison.

Taverna also records provenance of the evolution of the workflow definition (including a chain of wasDerivedFrom relations), attributions and annotations; for brevity we here focus on how Taverna’s workflow run provenance extends PROV and is embedded with Research Objects.

Tracking versions with PAV 2016-05-07

• PAV
• Tutorial
• Versioning

The PAV ontology specializes the W3C PROV-O standard to give a lightweight approach to recording details about a resource, giving its Provenance, Authorship and Versioning. Our paper on PAV explores all of these aspects in details. In this blog post we discuss Versioning as modelled by PAV, including their hierarchical organization.

• Version numbers {#versionnumbers}
  • Semantic versioning {#semver}
• Making versions retrievable {#retrievable}
• Ordering previous versions {#ordering}
  • Providing provenance for each version {#each-version}
• Related work {#relatedwork}
  • PROV-O revisions {#provo}
  • Qualified revisions {#qualified}
  • DC Terms {#dcterms}
  • schema.org {#schemaorg}
• Organize the versions {#organize}
  • Earlier versions {#earlier}
  • Has a version (snapshots) {#hasVersion}
  • Current version {#current}
  • Hierarchies all the way down {#hierarchies}

Versioning is commonly used for software releases (e.g. Windows 8.1, Firefox 26, Python 3.3.2), but increasingly also for datasets and documents. For the purpose of provenance, a version number allows the declaration of the current state of a resource, which can be cross-checked against release notes and used for references, for instance to indicate which particular version of a dataset was used in producing an analysis report.

What exactly happened to LSID? 2016-02-26

• Academic
• Linked Data

What exactly happened to LSID? It was a technically sound approach it would seem and one whose failure we would do well to learn more from.