2.4. Version and sharing data with Quilt

Conducting modeling reproducibly and collaboratively requires versioning and sharing data. Although Git/GitHub is well suited to versioning and sharing code and models, Git/GitHub is not well-suited to data because Git is based on line-by-line differencing of text files, because Git is designed for small files under 100 MB, and because Git requires the entire package and its history to be cloned. Quilt is a new system for versioning and sharing data with similar functionality to Git/GitHub and Docker/DockerHub.

2.4.1. Overview

Quilt is based on versioning packages of data, which are hierarhical trees of directories and files.

Quilt provides the following features:

• Capability to version data packages

• Capability to share packages with collaborators and with the world

• Programmatic access to upload, download, and update packages

• Web pages with READMEs to view and browse packages, including their histories

2.4.2. Using Quilt

See the Quilt documentation.