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Provenance and Reproducibility

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Computational reproducibility

Definition

A computational experiment composed by a sequence of steps S created at time T, on environment (hardware and operating system) E, using data D is reproducible if it can be executed with a sequence of steps S′ (modified from or equal to S) at time T′ > T, on environment E′ (potentially different than E), using data D′ that is similar to (or the same as) D with consistent results [5]. Replication is a special case of reproducibility where S′ = S and D′ = D. While there is substantial disagreement on how to define reproducibility [1], in particular across different domains, in this entry, we focus on computational reproducibility, i.e., reproducibility for computational experiments or processes.

The information needed to reproduce an experiment can be obtained from its provenance: the details of how the experiment was carried out and the results it derived. For computational experiments, provenance can be systematically and transparently...

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Correspondence to Fernando Chirigati .

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Chirigati, F., Freire, J. (2018). Provenance and Reproducibility. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80747

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