Reproducibility and provenance are increasingly important.

Makefiles and Makefile-like solutions such as biomake help with reproducibility; if the recipe and input files are provided in a github repo then in theory it is easy to re-executed and hopefully get the same answer.

However, if the final output files are submitted to a data repository, the provenance may not be immediately obvious. Initiatives such as BD2K are emphasizing the importance of metadata on all digital objects, which includes analysis results. Of course it is possible to manually annotate these artefacts, but why do that when this can be automated.

It should be possible for any file derived from biomake to immediately see a graph of objects used to derive it, together with complete metadata on each; this includes standard filesystem metadata e.g. timestamp but additional metadata too. See also https://github.com/W3C-HCLSIG/HCLSDatasetDescriptions

This may be a heavyweight feature so may be best implemented as some kind of plugin.