Software Tools to Collect and Use Provenance in R

The software tools that scientists use to process and analyze data are typically optimized for performance and ease of use. Few if any such tools are designed to capture and record the details of what happens as the tool performs its task. This detailed information, and more generally the history of an item of data from its creation to its present state, is known as provenance. Provenance has the potential to make science more transparent, reliable, and reproducible. This project focused on collecting and using provenance for scripts written in the R statistical language, which is widely used by ecologists and environmental scientists for data analysis and visualization. Our tools include a provenance collector (rdtLite), which collects provenance as an R script executes (or during a console session), as well as other tools that use the collected provenance to document and visualize the execution or to support activites such as script debugging. The R packages included here are also available on CRAN. For more details, see the project website on GitHub (https://end-to-end-provenance.github.io).