Audit logs to enforce document integrity in Skyline and Panorama

Area of Science:

• Proteomics and Metabolomics
• Computational Biology
• Software Engineering

Background:

• Graphical user interface (GUI) tools like Skyline present challenges for comprehensive audit logging due to complex user interactions.
• Tracking user modifications is crucial for reproducibility in scientific data analysis but is often not implemented in GUI applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and present an object comparison-based audit logging system for Skyline.
• To enhance the reproducibility and integrity of data analysis workflows involving Skyline and Panorama.

Main Methods:

• Implemented an audit logging system that tracks all document modifications via GUI or command line.
• Developed an interactive grid to display logged changes.
• Integrated audit logs with Panorama, a web repository, using embedded hashes for integrity verification.

Main Results:

• The new system successfully logs all modifications made to Skyline documents.
• The audit log is viewable in an interactive grid and can be uploaded to Panorama.
• Panorama can be configured to enforce the inclusion of valid audit logs, ensuring data integrity.

Conclusions:

• The object comparison-based audit logging system improves the reproducibility of Skyline-based workflows.
• This approach is extensible to other GUI tools, offering a general solution for audit logging challenges.
• Enhanced data integrity and transparency are achieved through the integrated logging and repository system.