[IPython-dev] Fwd: [SciTech] ActivePapers Python edition
Konrad Hinsen
konrad.hinsen at fastmail.net
Tue Dec 3 11:34:01 EST 2013
Thomas Kluyver writes:
> Have any of us come across ActivePapers? It combines code, data and
> documentation into an HDF5 file to be uploaded as supplementary info for a
> journal article. It looks like it focuses more on the storage and
> reusability than the presentation and interactivity of IPython notebooks -
> so there could be interesting opportunities for integration, such as an
> IPython notebook backed by code and data stored in this form.
>
> https://bitbucket.org/khinsen/active_papers_py/wiki/Home
I have had exactly that idea as well and I was planning to discuss
it here. You were a bit faster :-)
Note that ActivePapers already has a very basic IPython interface (try
"aptool ipython"), but that doesn't include notebooks, just an IPython
prompt for exploring the data in an ActivePaper.
Note also that ActivePapers has move to Github and has its own Web site:
http://www.activepapers.org/
My idea for integrating IPython notebooks into ActivePapers is to
store notebooks inside the ActivePapers HDF5 files and treat each cell
in a notebook like a calclet. Apart from writing all the interface
code, the main challenge is how and where to store provenance tracking
information. In ActivePapers, a calclet is an HDF5 dataset (containing
a string) whose metadata contains the dependency information. One
approach would eb to keep this representation and thus turn a notebook
into a sequence of HDF5 datasets. At the other extreme, one could
store notebooks in their native JSON representation inside an
ActivePaper and insert the dependency information in the JSON code, or
in a supplementary HDF5 dataset.
If anyone here is interested in contributing to this kind of work,
I'd be happy to discuss the details.
Konrad.
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