noWorkflow: Capturing and Analyzing Provenance of Scripts

We propose noWorkflow, a tool that transparently captures provenance of scripts and enables reproducibility. Unlike existing approaches, noWorkflow is non-intrusive and does not require users to change the way they work --- users need not wrap their experiments in scientific workflow systems, install version control systems, or instrument their scripts. The tool leverages Software Engineering techniques, such as abstract syntax tree analysis, reflection, and profiling, to collect different types of provenance, including detailed information about the underlying libraries. We describe how noWorkflow captures multiple kinds of provenance and the different classes of analyses it supports: graph-based visualization; differencing over provenance trails; and inference queries.

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