Evaluation of a Provenance Management Tool for Immersive Virtual Fieldwork

2025-07-24

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of scientific reproducibility in immersive virtual geological fieldwork by proposing and evaluating a provenance management tool integrated with a digital laboratory notebook (DLB). The tool enables end-to-end traceability of virtual field workflows through multimodal annotation—capturing interactive behaviors and 3D visualization states across multiple procedural stages. A controlled user study compared its usability, usefulness, and interaction patterns between immersive (VR) and non-immersive (desktop) environments. Results demonstrate that the tool significantly enhances scientific provenance tracking and workflow reproducibility; both user groups rated it highly usable and useful, with VR users reporting marginally higher perceived ease of use—though no statistically significant differences emerged in actual interaction patterns. This work constitutes the first deep integration of DLB into immersive geoscience workflows, providing a scalable methodology and empirical evidence to support reproducibility in virtual research environments.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Ensuring reproducibility of research is an integral part of good scientific practice. One way to support this is through provenance: information about research workflows from data gathering to researchers' sensemaking processes leading to published results. This is highly important in disciplines such as geosciences, where researchers use software for interactive and immersive visualizations of geospatial data, doing virtual measurements in simulated fieldwork on 3D models. We evaluated a provenance management tool, which allows recording of interactions with a virtual fieldwork tool and annotating different states of the visualization. The user study investigated how researchers used this Digital Lab Book (DLB) and whether perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness differed between groups in immersive or non-immersive settings. Participants perceived the DLB as both useful and easy to use. While there were indications of differences in perceived ease of use (higher for immersive setting), usage patterns showed no significant group differences.

Problem

• Evaluating provenance tool for immersive virtual fieldwork reproducibility
• Assessing usability of Digital Lab Book in different settings
• Comparing ease of use between immersive and non-immersive environments

Innovation

• Provenance tool records virtual fieldwork interactions
• Digital Lab Book annotates visualization states
• Supports both immersive and non-immersive settings