Taming the Diversity of Computational Notebooks
Yann Brault, Yassine El Amraoui, Mireille Blay–Fornarino, Philippe Collet, Florent Jaillet, Fŕed́eric Precioso · 2023
In many applications of Computational Science and especially Data Science, notebooks are the cornerstone of knowledge and experiment sharing. Their diversity is multiple (problem addressed, input data, algorithm used, overall quality) and is not made explicit at all. As they are heavily reused through a clone-and-own approach, the tailoring process from an existing notebook to a specific problem is cumbersome, error-prone, and particularly uncertain. In this paper, we propose a tooled approach that captures the different dimensions of variability in computational notebooks. It allows one to seek an existing notebook that suits her requirements, or to generate most parts of a new one.