SWIRRL. Managing Provenance-aware and Reproducible Workspaces

Abstract

Modern interactive tools for data analysis and visualisation are designed to expose their functionalities as a service through the Web. We present in this paper a Web API (SWIRRL) that allows Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to easily integrate such tools in their websites and re-purpose them to their users. The API deals, on behalf of the clients, with the underlying complexity of allocating and managing resources within a target cloud platform. By combining storage and containerised services, offering analysis notebooks and other visualisation software, the API creates dedicated working sessions on-demand, which can be accessed collaboratively. Thanks to the API's support for workflow execution, SWIRRL workspaces can be automatically populated with data of interest collected from external data providers. The system keeps track of updates and changes affecting the data and the tools by adopting versioning and standard provenance technologies. Users are provided with interactive controls enabling traceability and recovery actions, including the possibility of creating executable snapshots of their environments. SWIRRL is built in cooperation with two research infrastructures in the field of solid earth science and climate data modeling. We report on the particular adoptions and use cases.