provExplainR (version 1.0)

prov.explain: Provenance comparison functions

Description

prov.explain reads two provenance collections and finds differences between these two versions.

prov.diff.script visualizes the differences between two versions of a script that were previously executed.

Usage

prov.explain(dir1, dir2, save = FALSE)
prov.diff.script(first.script, dir1, dir2, second.script = NULL)

Arguments

dir1

path to first provenance directory

dir2

path to second provenance directory

save

if true saves the report to the file prov-explain.txt in the first directory

first.script

name of first script

second.script

name of second script, if different from the first script's name

Details

prov.explain and prov.diff.script are intended to help a user determine what has changed if multiple executions of a script lead to different results. prov.explain does this by comparing provenance collected using the rdtLite or rdt packages. prov.diff.script compares copies of the R scripts saved in provenance directories at the time that the scripts were executed.

The types of differences that prov.explain can find include:

• Environmental information identifying when the scripts were executed, the version of R, the computing systems, the tool and version used to collect the provenance, the location of the provenance file, and the hash algorithm used to hash data files.

• Versions of libraries loaded

• Versions of provenance tools

• Contents and names of main and sourced scripts

The prov.diff.script compares two versions of a script. Users must specify the name of the first script, the provenance directory associated with the first execution of the script, and the provenance directory associated with the second execution of the script. The name of the second script is optional. If it is omitted, the same script name is looked for in the second provenance directory

Examples

# NOT RUN {
prov.explain("first.test.dir", "second.test.dir")
# }