PNNL

Abstract

Scientific progress is becoming increasingly dependent of our ability to study phenomena at multiple scales and from multiple perspectives. The ability to recontextualize third party data within the semantic and syntactic framework of a given research project is increasingly seen as a primary barrier in multi-scale science. Within the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science (CMCS) project, we are developing a general-purpose informatics-based approach that emphasizes “on-demand” metadata creation, configurable data translations, and semantic mapping to support the rapidly increasing and continually evolving requirements for managing data, metadata, and data relationships in such projects. A concrete example of this approach is the design of the CMCS provenance subsystem. The concept of provenance varies across communities, and multiple independent applications contribute to and use provenance. In CMCS, we have developed generic tools for viewing provenance relationships and for using them to, for example, scope notifications and searches. These tools rely on a configurable concept of provenance defined in terms of other relationships. The result is a very flexible mechanism capable of tracking data provenance across many disciplines and supporting multiple uses of provenance information.