Embedded workspaces and their uses

Section author: David Nickerson

Todo

This section needs more work.

Workspaces in PMR are currently implemented as Git repositories. One Git feature that is quite useful in the context of the Auckland Physiome Repository is nested repositories. Using the more general PMR2 concepts, we term such nesting as embedded workspaces.

Embedded workspaces:

• are intended to manage the separation of modules which are integrated to create a model;
• facilitate the sharing and reuse of model components independently from the source model;
• enable the development of the modules to proceed independently, thus the version of the workspaces embedded is also tracked; and
• allow authors to make use of relative URIs when linking between data resources providing a file system agnostic method to describe complex module relationships in a portable manner.

Workspaces can be embedded at a specific revision or set to track the most recent revision of the source workspace. Changes made to the source workspace will not affect any embedding workspace until the author explicitly chooses to update the embedded workspace. This provides the author with the opportunity to review the changesets and make an informed decision regarding alterations to embedded revisions. Any alterations in the specific revision of an embedded workspace is data captured in a changeset in the embedding workspace – thus providing a clear provenance record of the entire dataset in the workspace.

Uses

Best practice