Over the course of this summer’s DataONE OPeNDAP effort, a key goal of ours has been the development of two things: new practices for managing provenance tracing within the OPeNDAP framework, as well as reference code for future developers to use as a reference.ย As of now, our reference code consists of the following contributions: (i) a set of “splash” pages for displaying content attached to provenance records (i.e., contributors to modules, as well as module versions) and (ii) extensions to OPeNDAP’s code base for tracking versions of modules utilized by specific provenance traces.
Over the next 1-2 weeks, our code extensions will gradually be pushed to the project’s OPeNDAP repository for public access: https://github.com/tetherless-world/opendap.ย Additionally, a collection of splash pages for presenting dynamic content from our provenance repository will be made publicly accessible on http://opendap.tw.rpi.edu.
Although we haven’t gotten everything coded up yet in the OPeNDAP Back-end Server (BES) Software Framework, we’ve got the abstractions in place, supporting method calls, sample RDF to be generated by the system, copy of the organizations Drupal site with modifications to be able to visualize RDF data, and the beginnings of our best practices document for module developers to use moving forward. We are well on our way to a full implementation of provenance within the BES which will come over the course of this next school semester with the help of other OPeNDAP developers, and integration with systems worked on in other projects within our lab.