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Provenance and DataONE: Facilitating Reproducible Science

Speakers

Lauren Walker

Lauren Walker

NCEAS

Lauren Walker is the Software Designer at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and for DataONE. Her work focuses on creating user-minded interfaces and web applications for environmental scientists.
Chris Jones

Chris Jones

NCEAS

Chris Jones is a Software Engineer at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked on informatics projects for the last fifteen years, focusing on generic solutions to common data management needs in the earth and ecological sciences. Chris has built systems to document and archive data for regional and international consortia, stream data in near real time from arrays of oceanographic sensors deployed across the insular Pacific islands, and has been involved in metadata standards development and ontology development. Chris tries to handle computer systems in stride, despite their frequent tantrums. He lives in Colorado.
Bertram Ludäscher

Bertram Ludäscher

University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Bertram Ludäscher is Director of Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, Professor at the School of Information Sciences, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He conducts research in scientific data management, scientific workflows, and data provenance. His research interests also include foundations of databases, knowledge representation, and reasoning. Ludäscher applies this work in a number of domains, e.g., biodiversity informatics and taxonomy.
In this webinar, we will first give an overview of the different types of provenance information and how they can be used, e.g., to facilitate reproducible science. We then show how a DataONE user can search and navigate provenance information using the new UI currently under development in DataONE. After this user-oriented view on provenance, we finally take a look “behind the scenes” of the DataONE provenance technologies and present plans for future developments. Read more

Provenance is a form of metadata that describes the lineage and processing history of data and knowledge artifacts and plays an important role in many scientific applications and use cases. For example, an ecologist might want to combine different datasets for a study, but needs to know how the candidate datasets were derived. A climate scientist might need to document the processing history of climate model outputs to facilitate reproducibility. A natural history collection manager might want to run automated data curation tools on specimen collection data, but has to understand the proposed “repairs” before executing them. In all these and many other cases like these, provenance information plays a crucial role. In this webinar, we will first give an overview of the different types of provenance information and how they can be used, e.g., to facilitate reproducible science.

We then show how a DataONE user can search and navigate provenance information using the new UI currently under development in DataONE. After this user-oriented view on provenance, we finally take a look “behind the scenes” of the DataONE provenance technologies and present plans for future developments.

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