Abstract-Scientific collaboration increasingly involves data sharing between separate groups. We consider a scenario where data products of scientific workflows are published and then used by other researchers as inputs to their workflows. For proper interpretation, shared data must be complemented by descriptive metadata. We focus on provenance traces, a prime example of such metadata which describes the genesis and processing history of data products in terms of the computational workflow steps. Through the reuse of published data, virtual, implicitly collaborative experiments emerge, making it desirable to compose the independently generated traces into global ones that describe the combined executions as single, seamless experiments. We present a model for provenance sharing that realizes this holistic view by overcoming the various interoperability problems that emerge from the heterogeneity of workflow systems, data formats, and provenance models. At the heart lie (i) an abstract workflow and provenance model in which (ii) data sharing becomes itself part of the combined workflow. We then describe an implementation of our model that we developed in the context of the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) project and that can "stitch together" traces from different Kepler and Taverna workflow runs. It provides a prototypical framework for seamless cross-system, collaborative provenance management and can be easily extended to include other systems. Our approach also opens the door to new ways of workflow interoperability not only through often elusive workflow standards but through shared provenance information from public repositories.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Archive established a data citation strategy based on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for the ARM datasets in order to facilitate citing continuous and diverse ARM datasets in articles and other papers. This strategy eases the tracking of data provided as supplements to articles and papers. Additionally, it allows future data users and the ARM Climate Research Facility to easily locate the exact data used in various articles. Traditionally, DOIs are assigned to individual digital objects (a report or a data table), but for ARM datasets, these DOIs are assigned to an ARM data product. This eliminates the need for creating DOIs for numerous components of the ARM data product, in turn making it easier for users to manage and cite the ARM data with fewer DOIs. In addition, the ARM data infrastructure team, with input from scientific users, developed a citation format and an online data citation generation tool for continuous data streams. This citation format includes DOIs along with additional details such as spatial and temporal information.
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