Experiment Explorer: Lightweight Provenance Search over Metadata

Scientific experiments typically produce a plethora of files in the form of intermediate data or experimental results. As the project grows in scale, there is an increased need for tools and techniques that link together relevant experimental artifacts, especially if the files are heterogeneous and distributed across multiple locations. Current provenance and search techniques, however, fall short in efficiently retrieving experiment-related files, presumably because they are not tailored towards the common use cases of researchers. In this position paper, we propose Experiment Explorer, a lightweight and efficient approach that takes advantage of metadata to retrieve and visualize relevant experiment-related files.