EWoPe: A light Embeddable WOrkflow PErsistence tool for geoscientific pipeline reproducibility

Scientific workflows are essential in modern geoscientific research, where complex, multi-stage computational pipelines are used to analyze heterogeneous environmental data. Ensuring the reproducibility and traceability of these workflows is critical but often challenging due to their intricacy and evolving structure. We introduce EWoPe (Embeddable Workflow Persistence), a lightweight and embeddable methodology and C++ library designed to persist and reconstruct scientific workflows over time. Unlike existing workflow systems and provenance tools, our method adds minimal overhead to workflow execution: it does not automate or optimize processes, but instead ensures persistence through lightweight and structured metadata. EWoPe models workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), in which each data node is linked to computational tasks through metadata. The latter captures input–output dependencies, algorithm parameters, execution commands, and intermediate results, supporting full traceability and reproducibility of computational histories. EWoPe offers dual usability: as a standalone command-line tool or as an embeddable component within larger applications. We show its flexibility and applicability through a case study involving a complex workflow leading to subsurface reaction-transport modeling, starting from boreholes data. The EWoPe library is publicly available and designed to be extensible, making it suitable for a wide range of scientific domains, including geochemistry, geophysics, environmental engineering, and any other fields where transparency and data integrity are critical.