Re: BioRDF minutes

This discussion about provenance:

  "Lena: But software packages change so any reference to the software
will be stale over the years.

  "Scott: Many types of provenance will go stale but essential
information about the origins of the information (provenance), such as
the method used to produce the p-values, is important to anyone
reusing the data. They want to know whether it's from LIMMA or MANOVA,
just as they want to know Affy vs. other types of arrays."

seems to assume that provenance information will unavoidably get stale.

I don't think that needs to be the case.  With a little forethought, I
think one can collect enough information that you have a good chance
of unambiguously identifying something like a software package.  If
rather than "LIMMA" you record something like "LIMMA v3.4.4 Windows
64-bit" (or even better, a structured version of that), you should be
able to trace even things which are version specific or
platform/compiler specific.  If the package has multiple methods that
might have been used for a task, include a reference to the
method/process also.

Tom

Received on Thursday, 22 July 2010 20:50:13 UTC