Wrattler Reproducible, live and polyglot notebooks

Tomas Petricek, James Geddes, Charles Sutton

In Proceedings of 10th USENIX Workshop on The Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP 2018)

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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@inproceedings{wrattler,
  author    = {Petricek, Tomas and Geddes, James and Sutton, Charles},
  title     = {Wrattler: Reproducible, live and polyglot notebooks},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 10th USENIX Workshop on The Theory and Practice of Provenance},
  series    = {TaPP 2018},
  location  = {London, UK},
  year      = {2018}
} 

If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via Twitter at @tomaspetricek.