Recording provenance of workflow runs with RO-Crate

TL;DR

This paper introduces Workflow Run RO-Crate, an extension of RO-Crate and Schema.org, to standardize and facilitate interoperable recording of computational workflow provenance across diverse systems, enhancing reproducibility and data sharing.

Contribution

It presents a new model for capturing workflow execution provenance that is interoperable, standards-aligned, and implemented across multiple workflow management systems.

Findings

Supported by an active open community.

Implemented in six workflow systems.

Applied in machine learning image analysis use cases.

Abstract

Recording the provenance of scientific computation results is key to the support of traceability, reproducibility and quality assessment of data products. Several data models have been explored to address this need, providing representations of workflow plans and their executions as well as means of packaging the resulting information for archiving and sharing. However, existing approaches tend to lack interoperable adoption across workflow management systems. In this work we present Workflow Run RO-Crate, an extension of RO-Crate (Research Object Crate) and Schema.org to capture the provenance of the execution of computational workflows at different levels of granularity and bundle together all their associated objects (inputs, outputs, code, etc.). The model is supported by a diverse, open community that runs regular meetings, discussing development, maintenance and adoption aspects. Workflow Run RO-Crate is already implemented by several workflow management systems, allowing interoperable comparisons between workflow runs from heterogeneous systems. We describe the model, its alignment to standards such as W3C PROV, and its implementation in six workflow systems. Finally, we illustrate the application of Workflow Run RO-Crate in two use cases of machine learning in the digital image analysis domain. A corresponding RO-Crate for this article is at https://w3id.org/ro/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10368989