Wrattler: Reproducible, live and polyglot notebooks

Authors: 

Tomas Petricek, University of Kent and The Alan Turing Institute; James Geddes, The Alan Turing Institute; Charles Sutton, The University of Edinburgh, The Alan Turing Institute, and Google

Abstract: 

Notebooks such as Jupyter became a popular environment for data science, because they support interactive data exploration and provide a convenient way of interleaving code, comments and visualizations. Alas, most notebook systems use an architecture that leads to a limited model of interaction and makes reproducibility and versioning difficult.

In this paper, we present Wrattler, a new notebook system built around provenance that addresses the above issues. Wrattler separates state management from script evaluation and controls the evaluation using a dependency graph maintained in the web browser. This allows richer forms of interactivity, an efficient evaluation through caching, guarantees reproducibility and makes it possible to support versioning.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {220321,
author = {Tomas Petricek and James Geddes and Charles Sutton},
title = {Wrattler: Reproducible, live and polyglot notebooks},
booktitle = {10th USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP 2018)},
year = {2018},
address = {London},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/tapp2018/presentation/petricek},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}