Implementing W2Share: Supporting Reproducibility and Quality Assessment in eScience

Abstract

An open problem in scientific community is that of supporting reproducibility and quality assessment of scientific experiments. Solutions need to be able to help scientists to reproduce experimental procedures in a reliable manner and, at the same time, to provide mechanisms for documenting the experiments to enhance integrity and transparency. Moreover, solutions need to incorporate features that allow the assessment of procedures, data used and results of those experiments. In this context, we designed W2Share, a framework to meet these requirements. This paper introduces our first implementation of W2Share, which moreover guides scientists in step-by-step process to ensure reproducibility based on a script-to-workflow conversion strategy. W2Share also incorporates features that allow annotating experiments with quality information. We validate our prototype using a real-world scenario in Bioinformatics.

Reproducibility and reuse of experiments in eScience

“…Most SWfMSs, moreover, provide an annotation interface, which can be taken advantage of. Our work [17] partially describes some of those annotation tasks.…”

“…We here show how this can be done automatically, in the best case and semi-automatically in the other cases, mapping W a elements to elements that can be executed in a SWfMS, e.g., Taverna. This step was outlined in a previous work [17]; here we provide a detailed description. As presented in Section 4.5, our machine-readable abstract workflow W a describes the activities encoded by the script code.…”

“…In [17], we presented the first implementation of a web prototype for W2Share that integrates the tools used to convert scripts into WRO. In that paper, we also address quality checking of the conversion process.…”

“…The competency questions and the case studies are additional contributions of our work. An initial implementation of our methodology is described in [17] and available at https://w3id.org/w2share.…”