Provenance#
Autosubmit manages experiments following the FAIR data principles, findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. It supports and uses open standards such as YAML, RO-Crate, as well as other standards such as ISO-8601.
Each Autosubmit experiment is assigned a unique experiment ID (also called expid). It also provides a central database and utilities that permit experiments to be referenced.
Every Autosubmit command issued by a user generates a timestamped log
file in <EXPID>/tmp/ASLOGS/. For example, when the user runs
autosubmit create <EXPID> and autosubmit run <EXPID>, these
commands should create files like <EXPID>/tmp/ASLOGS/20230808_092350_create.log
and <EXPID>/tmp/ASLOGS/20230808_092400_run.log, with the same content
that was displayed in the console output to the user running it.
Users can archive Autosubmit experiments. These archives contain the complete logs and other files in the experiment directory, and can be later unarchived and executed again. Supported archival formats are ZIP and RO-Crate.
RO-Crate#
RO-Crate is a community standard adopted by other workflow managers to package research data with their metadata. It is extensible, and contains profiles to package computational workflows. From the RO-Crate website, “What is RO-Crate?”:
RO-Crate is a community effort to establish a lightweight approach to packaging research data with their metadata. It is based on schema.org annotations in JSON-LD, and aims to make best-practice in formal metadata description accessible and practical for use in a wider variety of situations, from an individual researcher working with a folder of data, to large data-intensive computational research environments.
Autosubmit conforms to the following RO-Crate profiles:
Process Run Crate
Workflow Run Crate
Workflow RO-Crate
Experiments archived as RO-Crate can also be uploaded to Zenodo and to WorkflowHub. The Autosubmit team worked with the WorkflowHub team to add Autosubmit as a supported language for workflows. Both Zenodo and WorkflowHub are issuers of DOI’s (digital object identifiers), which can be used as persistent identifiers to resolve Autosubmit experiments referenced in papers and other documents.