Hi Greg, all I'm not sure about the Bronze Age, but in the Baroque era my understanding is that this is the job of metadata. You need a lot of machinery to do this, but in this era, data never lives "nakedly", but it always accompanied by metadata which describes it. So, you look up data by it's persistent identifier, in repositories, and deposit it, along with it's changelog or whatever, in repositories.
I am the first to concede that many, if not the vast majority of data civilisations will ever reach the Baroque age - and perhaps others will skip it altogether, but this happens to be the civilisation I'm writing to you from. I'd hazard the suggestion that the Baroque Age is also known as the Open Science age, just to be prickly. Have a great sunday! Bruce On Sun, 12 Aug 2018 at 15:15, Greg Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Back in the Stone Age, Software Carpentry's lessons spent a few minutes > discussing data provenance: > > - Include the string '$Id:$' in every source code file - Subversion > would automatically fill in the revision ID on every commit to turn it > into something like '$Id: 12345'. > > - Print the script's name, the commit ID, and the date in the header of > every output file (along with all the parameters used by the script). > > It wasn't much, and I don't know how many people ever actually > implemented it, but it did allow you to keep track of which versions of > which scripts had generated which output files in a systematic way. > > So here we are today in what I hope is research computing's Bronze Age, > and I'm curious: what do you all actually do to keep track of data > provenance? What tools or methods do you use to record which programs > produced which output files from which input files with which settings > and parameters? I was excited about the Open Provenance effort circa > 2006-07 (https://openprovenance.org/opm/), but it never seemed to catch > on. What are people using instead? > > Thanks, > > Greg > > -- > If you cannot be brave – and it is often hard to be brave – be kind. > > > ------------------------------------------ > The Carpentries: discuss > Permalink: > https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Te1cade367c0ab4ee-M703907d77763bffcdf143f1c > Delivery options: > https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription > ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Te1cade367c0ab4ee-M00bb6066a0d79e6158db8120 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
