Django prov_vo package

A prototype implementation of the IVOA Provenance Data Model

This package provides a resuable django application which is intended to be used within a Django project, see e.g. https://github.com/kristinriebe/provenance-rave/. It provides an implementation of the IVOA Provenance Data Model (see http://www.ivoa.net/documents/ProvenanceDM/ for the latest version), with a REST API and a ProvDAL interface to retrieve the stored provenance metadata.

Dependencies

This package implements a ProvDAL interface, for which the VOSI resources availability and capabilities need to be defined. It uses the

django-vosi

package for providing these.

Installation

• Download the package:

  git clone https://github.com/github/kristinriebe/django-prov_vo/
  

• Package the prov_vo app:

  cd django-prov_vo
  python setup.py sdist
  

• Switch to your main web application (or create it now with django-admin startproject <my_web_app>):

  cd ..
  cd <my_web_app>
  

  An example for a django project using this package is available at https://github.com/kristinriebe/provenance-rave

• Install the prov_vo app (e.g. inside your virtual environment) using pip:

  pip install ../django-prov_vo/dist/django-prov_vo-0.1.tar.gz
  

  Alternatively, you can also add the following lines in your projects's settings.py:

  import sys
  sys.path.append('../django-prov_vo/')
  

• Add prov_vo to your INSTALLED_APPS setting in settings.py like this:

  INSTALLED_APPS = [
      ...
      'prov_vo',
  ]
  

• Also install the django-vosi package and add to INSTALLED_APPS:

  INSTALLED_APPS = [
      ...
      'prov_vo',
      'vosi',
  ]
  

• Include the prov_vo URLconf in your project's urls.py like this:

  url(r'^prov_vo/', include('prov_vo.urls')),
  

• Install the requirements of this application, e.g. in a virtual environment:

  virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 env
  source env/bin/activate
  
  cd django-prov_vo
  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Run python manage.py migrate to update the database and create the provenance models.

• Start the development server and open a browser with http://127.0.0.1:8000/prov_vo/. You should see now a page with some introductory words and links to forms, activity lists etc.

Have fun! :-)

Testing

• This django application can be tested standalone, outside the project. First create a virtual environment and install the required python (2.7) packages:

  virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 env
  source env/bin/activate
  
  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Now switch to prov_vo and run:

  cd prov_vo
  python runtests.py
  

• This runs all the tests stored in tests.

• Use e.g. coverage run runtests.py tests.tests.ProvDAL_UsedDescription_TestCase for a single test case.

TODO

• Fix REST API: create new activities etc. (datetime format problem), allow data update (PUT)
• Proper error handling
• Move print-statements to error/debug log
• Write tests for checking all the functionality
• Use MySQL database/remote database instead of Sqlite3
• write extended documentation
• publish as PyPi package
• Implement votable serialization, for REST api and for Prov-DAL endoint
• Find a better way to visualize activityFlow, collection, detail/basic etc.