Last Tuesday, the kickoff meeting for Project 5 was held at RPI. For this project, our goal will be to extend the OpenDAP framework – a data access framework widely used in earth and space science – with extensions for provenance tracking. Through developing these extensions, we seek to enable two forms of provenance tracking:
Upstream Tracking: This tells a consumer the steps OpenDAP went through to obtain a data product.
Downstream Tracking: Likewise, this lets a consumer know how data they’ve previously submitted has been used and modified by others.
This week’s tasks involved setting up an RPI-hosted system to be used for summer OpenDAP development. A key piece of software to be used is Prizms – an RPI-developed framework for enabling the publication of RDF-based data. In the following week, a review of OpenDAP’s code base will be held to identify starting points for provenance extension development.