Scientific Data Provenance in R: RDataTracker and DDG Explorer

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 collect data provenance while executing an R script or during an R console session. The resulting provenance is stored on the scientist's computer as a DDG or data derivation graph. The second tool (DDG Explorer) is written in Java and allows the scientist to visualize, store, and query DDGs. Both tools are included in a single install package.