The METACLIP semantic provenance framework for climate products

Abstract

Having an effective way of dealing with data provenance is a necessary condition to ensure reproducibility, helping to build trust and credibility in research outcomes and the data products delivered. METACLIP (METAdata for CLImate Products) is a language-independent framework envisaged to tackle the problem of climate product provenance description. The solution is based on semantics exploiting the web standard Resource Description Framework (RDF), building on domain-specific extensions of standard vocabularies (e.g., PROV-O) describing the different aspects involved in climate product generation. We illustrate METACLIP through an example application within the open source R computing environment, generating a climate product for which full provenance information is recorded. Finally, the METACLIP Interpreter, a web-based interactive front-end for metadata visualization is presented, helping a diversity of users with different levels of expertise to trace and understand the provenance of a wide variety of climate data products, and to fully reproduce them.