VPlan – Ontology for Collection of Process Verification Data

Abstract

The reproducibility of modern research depends on the possibility to faithfully rerun the complex and distributed data transformation processes which were executed by scientists in order to make new scientific breakthroughs. New methods and frameworks try to address this problem by collecting evidence used for verification of such experiments. However, there is still a lack of a flexible data model which would address all of the needs of these methods. This paper presents the VPlan ontology designed for the purpose of organizing and storing of data collected for verification of preserved processes. The VPlan ontology stores and links the data extracted from the preserved process. Furthermore, it includes descriptions of actions taken to collect the data, as well as provides a clear break down of requirements that lead to its collection. We demonstrate the usage of the VPlan ontology within the preservation process and describe in detail its alignment with the Verification Framework (VFramework). In order to illustrate its applicability to the eScience domain, we evaluate it on a use case from the civil engineering domain, which is an example of a typical sensor data analysis process.