Automated Creation and Human-assisted Curation of Computable Scientific Models from Code and Text

TL;DR

This paper introduces a system that automates the creation and human-assisted curation of a knowledge graph of scientific models by analyzing code and documentation, enabling better understanding and reuse of complex models.

Contribution

It presents a novel system that extracts, annotates, and converts scientific models from code and text into executable workflows, improving model comprehension and accessibility.

Findings

Successfully applied to NASA's hypersonic aerodynamics models

Automates extraction of concepts and equations from code and documentation

Enables composition of models into complex workflows

Abstract

Scientific models hold the key to better understanding and predicting the behavior of complex systems. The most comprehensive manifestation of a scientific model, including crucial assumptions and parameters that underpin its usability, is usually embedded in associated source code and documentation, which may employ a variety of (potentially outdated) programming practices and languages. Domain experts cannot gain a complete understanding of the implementation of a scientific model if they are not familiar with the code. Furthermore, rapid research and development iterations make it challenging to keep up with constantly evolving scientific model codebases. To address these challenges, we develop a system for the automated creation and human-assisted curation of a knowledge graph of computable scientific models that analyzes a model's code in the context of any associated inline comments and external documentation. Our system uses knowledge-driven as well as data-driven approaches to identify and extract relevant concepts from code and equations from textual documents to semantically annotate models using domain terminology. These models are converted into executable Python functions and then can further be composed into complex workflows to answer different forms of domain-driven questions. We present experimental results obtained using a dataset of code and associated text derived from NASA's Hypersonic Aerodynamics website.