The Medici desktop client demonstrates how data processing steps can be supported when focusing on data management. The primary concern with processing and data management is to keep track of the data provenance and describe what happened to the data. This history of the data, the data provenance, is fundamental for experimental and process reproducibility. The desktop client enables users to launch external tools and capture the inputs and outputs of the processes and store this information as part of the metadata. The web client displays this information on the page so that researchers can easily identify derived data and determine its origin.
For more information check out a two page Medici whitepaper that was presented at the Microsoft e-Science in 2010.