EarthCube Building Blocks: Collaborative Proposal: GeoTrust: Improving Sharing and Reproducibility of Geoscience Applications

科学的可重复性——独立验证其他科学家工作的能力——仍然是实现跨学科科学愿景的关键障碍。联邦机构和出版商越来越多地要求和激励科学家至少建立科学实验的计算可重复性。为了遵守这一规定，科学家必须将学术出版物中对科学实验的描述与用于产生已发表的结果和发现的基础数据和代码联系起来。然而，在实践中，计算重现性很难实现，因为它需要隔离必要的和足够的计算工件，然后以标准的方式保存这些工件，以便以后重新执行。隔离和保存在很大程度上都带来了挑战，因为现有软件和系统的复杂性，以及随着时间的推移而演变的隐含依赖关系、资源分布和不断变化的系统兼容性——所有这些都破坏了实验的可重复性。GeoTrust项目的目标是了解科学实验从构思到发表的研究生命周期，并建立一个框架，以提高其可重复性。GeoTrust将开发基于沙盒的系统和工具，帮助科学家有效地隔离与实验相关的计算工件，使用语言和语义来保存工件，并通过部署工件、更改数据集、算法、模型、环境等重新执行/重现实验。这一可复制的框架将被三个地球科学分支学科（即水文学、固体地球和空间科学）的社区基础设施所采用和整合。利用这些子学科的跨学科科学用例，并聘请独立评估人员，我们将评估该框架在实现计算实验可重复性方面的有效性。最后，验证结果将与？重现性邮票？建立计算实验的社区认可。该框架将作为EarthCube的一种能力进行开发，并根据EarthCube的要求开发和发布软件。将继续寻找其他地球科学分支学科的早期采用者。

Scientific reproducibility -- the ability to independently verify the work of other scientists -- continues to be a critical barrier towards achieving the vision of cross-disciplinary science. Federal agencies and publishers increasingly mandate and incentivize scientists to, at a minimum, establish computational reproducibility of scientific experiments. To comply scientists must connect descriptions of scientific experiments in scholarly publications with the underlying data and code used to produce the published results and findings. However, in practice, computational reproducibility is hard to achieve since it entails isolating necessary and sufficient computational artifacts and then preserving those artifacts in a standard way for later re-execution. Both isolation and preservation present challenges in large part due to the complexity of existing software and systems as well as the implicit dependencies, resource distribution, and shifting compatibility of systems that evolve over time -- all of which conspire to break the reproducibility of an experiment. The goal of the GeoTrust project is to understand the research lifecycle of scientific experiments from conception to publication and establish a framework that will improve their reproducibility. GeoTrust will develop sandboxing-based systems and tools that help scientists effectively isolate computational artifacts associated with an experiment, use languages and semantics to preserve artifacts, and re-execute /reproduce experiments by deploying the artifacts, changing datasets, algorithms, models, environments, etc. This reproducible framework will be adopted by and integrated within community infrastructures of three geoscience sub-disciplines viz. Hydrology, Solid Earth, and Space Science. Using cross-disciplinary science uses cases from these sub-disciplines, and engaging independent evaluators, we will assess the effectiveness of the framework in achieving reproducibility of computational experiments. Finally, verified results will be associated with ?stamps of reproducibility?, establishing community recognition of computational experiments. The framework will be developed as an EarthCube capability, with software developed and released as per EarthCube requirements. Early adopters across other geoscience sub-disciplines will be continually sought.