Unformatted, Certified Scientific Objects

We present an approach for scientific data management systems to apply certificates to scientific objects, which are typically unformatted datasets, to facilitate analysis by climate scientists. Typically, for a program to process data, the program requires cleansed data in a form that supports automatic manipulation. Most systems require that data must adhere to a specific format to achieve that goal. The technique described in this paper takes the opposite approach; instead, any dataset may be imported and manipulated in the system. But upon initial import, however, only a subset of system functions may work with any given dataset. As the data is refined and transformed by system functions, more functions may become compatible. Certificates are associated with objects that pass constraint validation within the system to ensure that they conform to function requirements. The attached object constraints represent invariant properties of the object, which may be used by functions in the system as function preconditions. Furthermore, the functions defined in the system may associate certificates with the newly generated results. Certificates related to function results are effectively function postconditions, which in turn are used to associate certificates with the objects generated in the system. Additionally, attached object certificates reflect the refinement of data into a more pristine version. This paper describes the technique for modeling and enforcing the constraints for data scientists that have similar requirements.