Preserving File Provenance Using Principles of Blockchain to Ensure Scientific Reproducibility
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Hasan, Rizbanul; Purawat, Shweta; Olschanowsky, Catherine; Altintas, Ilkay
- Source
- 2023 IEEE 19th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science) e-Science (e-Science), 2023 IEEE 19th International Conference on. :1-7 Oct, 2023
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Databases
Data integrity
Laboratories
Organizations
Reproducibility of results
Blockchains
Reliability
data provenance
reproducibility
scientific workflow
metadata
blockchain
- Language
- ISSN
- 2325-3703
Reproducibility plays an essential role in scientific research to ensure accuracy and serves as a foundation for future advancements. Scientific reproducibility becomes particularly challenging when dealing with vast amounts of input files that change hands or move across different laboratories or organizations. Preserving the provenance of data files ensures critical information about the originality of data files is captured to support the reproducibility of scientific research. The paper focuses on capturing and verifying input and output data file provenance using the principles of blockchain. The technique stores the hashes of data files in a database along with user and workflow information. It allows the workflow to verify the data against the hashes at any point. The method is demonstrated using Parflow, a Hydrologic model, as a proof-of-concept.